Drunkenness

Last week at London, Richard Joshua Reynolds, 23, son of the late founder of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. (Camel cigarets, etc.), was found guilty of killing a man while drunk and driving his motor car. The court sentenced him to five months' light imprisonment for manslaughter.

Last week at Los Angeles, Mrs. Alexander Pantages, wife of the western theatrical chain man, was charged with murder for killing a man while drunk and driving her motor car.

Last week at London, Denys Stanley Thomas, Royal Air Force officer, was sentenced to one year hard labor for operating his airplane, while drunk, so erratically that a scared man passenger jumped to his death.

No isolated cases of inebriated homicides were these. Nor was Mrs. Pantages' killing, if she was drunk as charged, strange. For decades women have been tippling as heavily as men. and in great numbers. In England and Wales, for example, as far back as the beginning of this century two women died of alcoholism to every three men. The Keeley Institute at Dwight, Ill., which was in the news last week because it is enlarging its inebriety cure facilities, has had women patients since the late Leslie E. Keeley founded it a half century ago.* The "Keeley Cure" usually requires four weeks. The charge is $150, plus board & lodgings. Last year the institute treated more drunks than during any year since 1911.

Just what constitutes drunkenness is an undetermined medico-legal point. As everyone knows individuals vary in their susceptibility to alcohol. One man's, or woman's, drink may be his or her food and stimulant, and another's poison.

Alcohol's first effect is euphoria, a sense of wellbeing. Mental inhibitions are released. The drinker is gay. Later comes depression, the narcotic effect of alcohol. However, alcohol is not the only stimulant which acts that way. Strong tea and coffee act the same. So too, tobacco, chloroform, ether.

Because a drinker's urine, blood and cerebrospinal fluid contain alcohol, the amount therein furnishes a quantitative test of his bibbling. But because susceptibility varies, such amount can at most give only a presumption of his intoxication. By such test was Wilmer Stultz, the trans-Atlantic flyer, pronounced drunk after he killed himself recently (TIME, July 15, 1929). In the living person the test must be made very soon after he is charged with being drunk to have value, because alcohol oxides rapidly, and disappears from the system as carbon dioxide and water.

Few judges know of this quantitative test. They depend upon the layman's crude idea of drunkenness--can the accused walk a straight line, can he stand on one leg, can he clearly enunciate "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." Perhaps a medico-legal diagnosis of just what does constitute drunkenness may evolve for the world from clinical investigations which Belgium's Societe de medecine legale now has under way.

*Keeley Institute advertisement: "Hundreds of ladies have taken the Keeley Treatment for Liquor. They have complete privacy ... the exact degree of privacy which they desire. All lady patients are treated in their own rooms, a physician and nurse visiting them for that purpose. Every courtesy and aid is extended to them by the physicians, attendants and nurses . . . and every effort made to make their visit as enjoyable as possible."