Episode 1: How did we get here?
Robbie Shaw:
The podcast Champagne Problems is where we come together to explore the gray areas of drinking. This is a judgment-free zone where we can all take a look at how we make decisions about our relationship with alcohol.
Sam Hampson:
Drinking is all-consuming and it's everywhere. It's just what we do. And if you don't drink or if alcohol is not present in your life, that's abnormal because the norm is to drink. It's just so ingrained.
Robbie Shaw:
Think about people who are in sales roles and do the majority of their relationship-building outside of the office. Any kind of social event, there’s alcohol present. And if you don't drink, do you make less money? Can you not fulfill your responsibilities?
Sam Hampson:
Alcohol use doesn’t really fit into wellness or physical health. It's more in this social, hobby thing. It's just a thing we do versus all the conversations we have around wellness. I'm always in the back, wanting to raise my hand, like “what about your vodka?” It's just strange that we always talk around it. It’s always in our hand but we never talk about it.
Patrick Balsley:
It’s so crazy how the marketing world has coupled alcohol with all these new, healthy activities. It's like they piggybacked off the wellness movement to make sure they weren't left out and they've done a really good job of doing that.
Robbie Shaw:
I mean, you go run and there's kegs at the end. I love the discussion of the wellness piece, but excluding alcohol.
Patrick Balsley:
“I’ll look at the alcohol, but I’m going to figure out all the ways to make it fit into my wellness journey.”
Rich Jones: Clinician, Health and Wellness Expert
Patrick Balsley:
I’m elated about our guest to kick things off. I was made aware of Rich Jones three or four years ago, I happened to stumble upon him on Facebook. He comes from the clinical world. And he does identify as a person in recovery for 20 years. But he takes more of a health and wellness approach towards severe alcohol use.
Rich Jones:
Thanks for having me guys. I am the CEO of FAVOR Greenville. Favor stands for Faces and Voices of Recovery. We’re a nonprofit organization that serves about 45,000 folks across South Carolina. Picture recovery coaching, family recovery coaching, intervention services - anything and everything related to the community.
The secondary thing I have going on right now is I’m the co-founder of an online learning management program called Youturn. Youturn provides early intervention, education, and prevention around mental health and substance use disorders. Overall, there is a focus on the upstream interventions. Let's get to folks before they get a DUI, before they drive the car into a tree, etc.
Robbie Shaw:
Wow man, that is extremely admirable. You’ve got a lot of stokes in the fire. We’d love to hear, if you’re open to it, a little about your story. What got you here?
Rich Jones:
My story is pretty traditional in terms of starting drinking at a young age. I come from a household that, I didn't know at the time, but there was binge drinking going on. My father was struggling, very unpredictable. He could be a violent guy when he drank. Played a lot of sports and that kept me out of trouble. I had a football scholarship and a baseball scholarship after I lost a football scholarship. So I was that kind of guy that could get by, but alcohol entered my life probably around the age of 14 or 15. It just was a non-issue, man. Underage drinking was not a big deal. And I never really thought twice about it.
I just kind of did my thing. I went to college and got my undergraduate degree in business management. I was going to work in the business world. I have a lot of entrepreneurs in my family. So that was going to be the path I took. In 1999, I was in a car accident and I started to get prescribed opioids. And I'm going to tell you, man, like I have strong opinions on the opioid epidemic and on opioids in general, but I believe there are some of us that it's a match made in heaven. And that's how it was with me and opioids.
I remember being terrified when I realized there wasn't enough of them. Starting to get sick and everything that goes along with that. I didn't know. I mean, this was a different world in 1999. It was all doctor shopping. And I didn't really know how to buy pills from the streets. I wrote up a hell of a lot of debt. We went bankrupt. It gets expensive to pay for paper prescriptions out of pocket. And by 2001, I'm in recovery. And I didn't get it the first time. Right. So my clean date is 2/14/02 or my recovery date if you will, 2/14/02.
I would put together periods of time and then I would fall off and I would put together periods of time and I would fall off. I finally got it on February 14th, 2002. But I'm telling you, like all those experiences I had up to that point, that is part of my journey and part of my process. We want people to understand that that's how this works. It isn't like one day you wake up and you're like, “oh, I'm in recovery now and I'm going to be good to go.” And that was absolutely how it was with me. It got worse in recovery before it got better. It was brutal. My wife and I split up and all the noise that goes along with that. And in my case, what happened was I stumbled into the right type of 12 step groups.
Alcohol Culture in America: The Normalization of Alcohol Use
Robbie Shaw:
We're really honing in on the normalization of alcohol consumption in our, I'd like to say, world, but we can kind of hone it in on American society. But what are your thoughts on some of the contributing factors to the normalization of alcohol in our cultures?
Rich Jones:
Well, the first thing I would say is the media. I would say that it's promoted that that's how you have fun, that's how you relax. So there's this messaging and it starts when we're young, when it's unconscious - and it's just how the psychology of marketing works - that drinking is fun. That drinking is how you have a good successful life. And jokingly the commercials never look like reality, but that's what we think is going to happen. We go out with our friends, you dance a little bit, you hang out, and you have a good time. And I don't think that we're aware of how ubiquitous those advertisements are and how ubiquitous that messaging is. So there's this underlying current and effort to normalize it.
The second thing is it is absolutely institutionalized. Think about it. From a sociological perspective, it's how we mark milestones in our life. At a wedding, we drink. At a funeral, we drink. I got promoted, we drink. And it doesn't mean we drink problematically, that's just what we do. And I don't think we even really fully grasp how normalized it is and how institutionalized.
Sam Hampson:
I think to add to it, there's really no examples of how you do those things without alcohol. Like I remember when I removed alcohol from my life for a period of about two years and I had never seen any examples of something that I was going to do, but without alcohol. For example, my best friend's bachelorette party. I had never seen an example of someone doing that sober. And so I just didn't know what it would look like to be the only girl there not drinking. No examples of it anywhere.
What can we do to fix Alcohol Culture in America?
Rich Jones:
I think our societal response has to be different. It has to be wellness-oriented. And it's almost like talking about alcohol is casual. If it gets to a point where, again, it's the cookies, it's gambling, it's shopping too much, it's anything that you're doing that you're not living congruent with the way you want to live, and so alcohol can be part of that conversation. One of the wild things is when we try to sell this product, we have to be very careful how we even talk about it because we will offend the people that are buying it because they drink and they don't want to hear “don't drink.” That's the wellness angle. I don't know that we've definitely figured out how to message that just yet as a society, but that's where it'll come in.
Patrick Balsley:
So Rich, what are some of the things when we talk about this kind of gray area group, or the population in the middle. They drink a little bit, but they may not see any issues with it and may not feel like it has any type of negative impact on their life. What are some of the questions that you think are appropriate for people to start asking themselves if they're kind of in that, I don't want to use the term sober curious, but I'm going to, but they actually really want to start taking an honest look at their drinking.
Rich Jones:
Believe it or not, there are some guidelines that people can look at. And there's even controversy in this area. So there's a lot of new literature and a lot of push around this idea that any amount of alcohol is unhealthy. Like that's what people will say. That's a new kind of vibe. But if you move away from that and you look at what the federal government has put out, they talk about 15 drinks per week if you're a man. 15 drinks per week and no more than five drinks on any one occasion. Now I got that done by Monday morning. Like I exceeded those expectations. But for a lot of people, that's a guideline.
If you drink above that level for an extended period of time, you're going to suffer physical consequences. It has nothing to do with the term alcohol addiction or alcohol use disorder, you will suffer high blood pressure. You'll increase your risk for cancer. You'll increase your risk for other heart diseases. That type of stuff sometimes is a place to start with folks. Do you understand just the straight-up physical impact of continuing to drink like that? And for women it's seven and two. They only get seven per week and more than two on any given occasion, which I just think is tragic. So what I think we have to do is take it out of the hands and the drug and alcohol system, and it needs to be more of a wellness-oriented, healthy lifestyle.
Patrick Balsley:
I mean, this is something that I obsess over, I know you do too, what does that look like in your mind?
Rich Jones:
We have to get realistic on how long it's going to take. We have to understand what we're trying to do. We're not trying to improve a system and we're not trying to tweak it a little bit, we're trying to totally disrupt it and redefine it and develop a brand new paradigm. And that takes time. But you gotta start the conversation and you have to beat the drum and then ultimately you have to have new funding streams come up.
Sam Hampson:
Do you think, Rich, that there's any ways that we have progressed in the US around alcohol use, alcohol education? Obviously, outside of your own efforts with Youturn, do you think that there's progression that you see?
Rich Jones:
No, I think it sucks. And I think that it's not even close. And I feel like we have these pockets where people are really trying to do some things different, but I think that we still have the old guard in charge. So if you look at solving this problem, it's still the same old mentality and the same old folks that are talking at the national level and at the policy level, at the reimbursement level. There's really not a lot of progress been made. There's probably more progress around advocacy and at least we're talking about it. I will say that. Like, at least we're talking about it, but nothing has really shifted in terms of actually operationalizing these things.
Start Today: How to Have a Healthy Relationship with Alcohol
Patrick Balsley:
I meet people where they are all the time. And I have people, they don't meet criteria for even a moderate substance use disorder and they'll come and say, “hey, I want to kind of look at this.” And I think that's the framework that I suggest for a lot of people that are in the gray area that really want to take an honest look at their drinking, set some parameters, set some boundaries or some limits around your use, and see if you can do it. And then if you can't, then let's have another conversation. But what I think is kind of the reason and purpose of this podcast and things like this is to inspire or educate people to the point where they start to have a desire to set those parameters.
Rich Jones:
Well, think about this, in the age of the pandemic, we were seeing a 300% increase in alcohol consumption. That's not alcoholics that increased, that's your everyday drinker. Do you follow me? So like, alcoholics, we don't need a pandemic to get hammered. Like I was increasing my drinking, regardless of whether the world was going to end. But if I'm like a casual drinker, we saw the response to stress, right? The other angle is stress management. So if you think about it this way, if you think about stress management in general, how does stress get to us? Well, we develop coping skills that aren't healthy. Right. It could be being on the internet chasing a conspiracy theory for 12 hours a day. It could be gambling. It could be like me pounding seven Krispy Kreme donuts in the break room for some ungodly reason, or it could be taking your drinking from a couple of drinks a night to seven. We can talk about the cookies or we can talk about the beers, but it's all under the same umbrella.
Patrick Balsley:
What are some of the things that you would suggest to our listeners that are only having a couple of drinks at night, but want to take a look at it? Or what are some of those new healthy behaviors that they could bring in to maybe crowd some of that drinking out?
Rich Jones:
The first thing that I would say is focus on the physical part. So ask yourself, how are you feeling just in general? How are you feeling physically? And do you think that your consumption of alcohol may have anything to do with that? I know that if there's any area where it can get real tangible, you're probably going to feel better immediately if you adjust your drinking. The second area is how is it impacting your interpersonal relationships? I do think there's something to that part of it. And that doesn't mean that you're an alcoholic. It's like if my wife doesn't like heavy metal music and I'm blasting it every night and it's causing problems in our relationship, maybe I want to take a look at that.
And then I think there's like an open-ended kind of self-awareness question like, why do I need this in my life? Or why not talk about it, I guess, what's the downside to exploring this issue? What if you tell yourself, I don't have to quit, period. I don't have to change anything, am I still allowed to talk about it? So those types of things.
Robbie Shaw:
That is at the root of what we're talking about. I mean, we can sit here and analyze this to the core, but it really does boil down to, do you want to be different? Are you happy with what's going on? Are you even in touch with what's going on? Are you able to assess the goods and bads in your life and an increase or decrease as you see fit?
Patrick Balsley:
This is such a personal inner journey that we have to go on. For me, it took all these negative consequences to occur in my life for me to get to this point to just take a look at what was really going on inside. And that's why I'm so excited about not only doing this podcast, but this whole health and wellness movement. It's opening the door and making it more accessible and more kind of in your face like, hey, why don't you take a look at this?
Sam Hampson:
And it's not about following our journeys. My story is my own. It's just about evaluating how do I get what I want? Is this compatible with the things that I want? Is this compatible with the wellness goals I have, the physical health goals and just asking those questions? I just think it's cool to be able to come together and ask some of that to each other, present some of those personal journeys to others, and hope that other folks are just able to question.
Robbie Shaw:
The information and opinions shared on this podcast are solely those of the hosts and guests and not a substitute for medical advice. If you feel like you may need professional help, here are some resources. For the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration hotline, call 1-800-662-4357 or visit samhsa.gov. For listeners in the Charlotte, North Carolina community, visit dilworthcenter.org, or call 704-372-6969 or visit theblanchardinstitute.com or call 704-288-1097.