“Understanding Alcohol Use and Abuse”

I do love a Disney educational film. I have covered some of the weirdest shorts Disney has to offer. I’d rather put an educational short above a made-for-Disney Channel movie in the stuff we’ll cover for the column, though admittedly that’s at least part the column’s intended emphasis on the more obscure stuff. A lot of my readers are younger than I am and have nostalgia for the golden age of made-for-Disney Channel content, and in fact they know them better than I do. But my goodness can I tell you about how Disney taught us about all sorts of aspects of our lives. After all, some of these shorts were still being used in my childhood, possibly including this one.

This one is from a series I don’t really remember about the health triangle. We learn the importance of the mental, physical, and social aspects of health. This film in particular is about, as it says, the short-term effects of the consumption of ethyl alcohol. Your liver processes it, but it can only process so much at a time, sending the rest to your bloodstream—and in particular your brain, which uses an awful lot of blood. Its use puts emotion in control over reason, here personified as a caveman and a nerd. I don’t know if the film’s “four degrees of inebriation” stems from outdated science or was just made up by Disney, but to my knowledge the actual medical stuff isn’t bad.

One of the important things the short gives us is that not everyone handles alcohol the same way. Some people take more alcohol to feel the same effect. That said, the film doesn’t say “some people like the taste” or “some people enjoy a mild buzz.” Even I who do not drink know that much. That said, the emphasis that buzzed driving is drunk driving is important. That said, I disagree with the idea that drunk people are completely different than they normally are. In my experience, who you are drunk is who you are inside.

I watched this with my daughter, and we used it as a starting point. She knows I don’t drink, and she knows I don’t drink because I dislike the taste of the compound ethyl alcohol. I’ve suggested to her brother that drinking is bad for someone with his particular mental health issues, because he already puts a lot of effort into keeping reason in control over emotion, and he doesn’t want to undermine that with alcohol. He turned thirteen this past Sunday, so he’s of an age where that sort of conversation is increasingly important.

Look, I’ve watched worse educational shorts about drug use. I’ve watched worse educational shorts about drug use in an academic setting. I grew up in the days of Just Say No, after all, and I’ll never forget Steven Tyler saying, on the MTV “end of the ‘80s” special, that saying Just Say No to a heroin addict was like saying Just Cheer Up to a manic depressive. (1989, everyone!) I’ve always kind of wanted to tell him that people do that. But as a starting point, this short is a lot better than a lot of others. It’s just that it’s hard to teach nuance in under ten minutes.