When Whitaker was growing up, her parents divorced. Her mother suffered from chronic health problems and struggled to make ends meet. By her early teens, Whitaker was already determined to avoid poverty as an adult. One weekend when she was 13 years old, Whitaker got drunk for the first time, and she continued to drink and use marijuana throughout high school. After a tumultuous time at university, Whitaker graduated with a degree in business management economics and was hired at an accounting firm.

Whitaker recalls how her alcohol use disorder developed over time. Initially, her wild nights of drinking and many hangovers felt like “extremely normal, cliched college behavior” that was routine in her friend group (34). While she sometimes disliked how alcohol made her life more chaotic, Whitaker also felt that heavy drinking gave her status in her peer group. This intensified when she graduated from university and became more involved in California’s wine subculture, priding herself on being knowledgeable about wines.

Whitaker’s new job made her feel respected, and she chased promotions and raises, but she felt trapped on a “hamster wheel.” She continued to feel pressured from credit card debt and a constant sense of inadequacy. By her mid-twenties, she was working at a health care start-up in San Francisco and relied on her work to help her feel successful and complete. Drinking and staying thin made Whitaker feel good about herself but couldn’t erase the stress she felt. Even with a high-paying job, Whitaker was crushed by debt, and after a break-up, her drinking and bulimia worsened.

Finally, Whitaker stopped believing that she could fix her life with temporary solutions like cleanses, self-help books, or budgets. One morning after a night of heavy drinking, Whitaker surveyed the chaos of her apartment and thought critically about her life, realizing that she simply had to stop drinking.

Whitaker argues that our culture’s simplistic perspective on drinking keeps people in denial about the toll alcohol is taking on their lives. By separating people into “normies,” or people who can drink casually without developing a problem, and people with alcohol use disorder, drinkers don’t consider how they might be better off without drinking at all, regardless of whether they fit the exact definition or not.

She continues by discussing the parallels between cigarettes and alcohol. For decades, cigarette smoking was normalized and aggressively marketed to the public, until finally enough research tipped the scales, creating a widespread awareness that cigarettes are toxic. She argues that even though drinking continues to be marketed as a fun and even healthy pastime, alcohol is “poison.”

Whitaker is amazed that the health-conscious millennial generation drinks alcohol, otherwise known as ethanol, which is also used as an antiseptic cleaner and an engine fuel. According to Whitaker, alcohol is an “addictive, toxic chemical” (52), but people do not regard it as such because everyone, even supposed health advocates, normalize its consumption.

The author investigates the health consequences of using alcohol and points to research that shows that alcohol disrupts sleep, fosters anxiety, interferes with the body’s detoxification system, promotes weight gain, creates facial redness, compromises brain function, and throws blood sugar off balance. It also disrupts hormones, promotes aging, compromises the gut microbiome, and is connected to seven cancer types.

Whitaker considers alcohol’s role in women’s lives. At a women’s rally in 2017, she noticed that after protesting misogyny, women flocked to bars. She wonders why many women are conscious of different systemic forces of oppression but are not upset at how their lives are being affected by alcohol. Whitaker blames alcohol companies for intentionally marketing drinking as a form of empowerment and liberation, conflating the two in women’s minds. To Whitaker, resisting alcohol should be considered a feminist issue, since she believes that alcohol is “a drug designed to keep us down” (70).

Whitaker points to her relationship with cigarettes to show the power of addiction. As a self-conscious teen, she began to smoke to feel confident with her peers. Over the years, she tried to quit many times but was always drawn back to cigarettes. She feels that her addiction is a byproduct of Big Tobacco’s decades of successful marketing in the US, beginning with the 1930s incorporation of smoking into Hollywood movies. Over the years, however, smoking has become less normalized as research has revealed its toxicity.

She argues that alcohol will soon have its own “cigarette moment” as people learn more about its harmful effects. In the meantime, it is difficult to confront people’s deep cultural and personal attachment to alcohol. Alcohol has been a part of many human cultures for thousands of years and remains “ubiquitous” in ceremonial and celebratory functions. Whitaker believes that the alcohol industry is more damaging than Big Tobacco because alcohol is so enmeshed with society.

The author believes that the alcohol industry is now copying the tobacco industry’s strategies to ensure that more people get addicted to alcohol. First, they are marketing alcohol to new demographics, such as women and children. She argues that because 3.3 million people die every year due to alcohol related diseases, the alcohol industry needs to replace those consumers with new ones. Alcohol companies target new customers in countries with little existing alcohol culture, such as India, causing drinking rates to rise. Whitaker connects “Big Alcohol’s” marketing and distribution in South America, Asia, and Africa with the rising rates of alcohol-related addictions and deaths in those continents.

The second tactic Big Alcohol is using, Whitaker argues, is “engineered consent.” Just as cigarette companies manipulated people into believing that they wanted to smoke, Big Alcohol is using the idea of women’s liberation to persuade women to drink. Whitaker recalls how she felt proud of drinking stereotypically masculine drinks like lager and whisky, and drank competitively with men. With social media, women themselves have become accidental marketers of drinking by sharing their drinking experiences online. Whitaker believes that unhealthy drinking has become normalized in women’s circles through products like wine glass holders for bathtubs, silly sayings on onesies and tea towels, wine yoga classes, and more.

The third tactic, she asserts, is “engineered controversy.” Whitaker argues that Big Alcohol uses this tactic to convince people that irresponsible heavy drinkers, not alcohol, are the problem, and that most people can drink “responsibly.” She attacks the notion that some people are inherently more prone to addiction and claims that this narrative is a product of Big Alcohol’s manipulation. Instead of blaming people for developing addictions to alcohol, Whitaker believes that consumers should blame alcohol itself.

Whitaker laments that so many people believe the “lie” of marketing and are more likely to associate alcohol with positives such as celebration, joy, and romance than its known consequences such as illness, rape, and death. People’s strong positive associations with alcohol make it difficult for them to grapple with the new research that suggests that no amount of alcohol is healthy.

The author remembers vacationing in Mexico with a close friend, who told her about a friend who could no longer vacation with them because he was in recovery as an alcoholic. Listening to the stories about the man’s alcohol use disorder, Whitaker was frightened to recognize her own behaviors. She stopped drinking for a few days but then used the decision as justification to start drinking again, since she felt that someone with alcohol use disorder could not stop drinking like she did. She explains that by favorably comparing her relationship with alcohol to others’, she stayed “trapped” in the cycle of drinking.

When Whitaker learned about Borderline Personality Disorder, she became convinced that she had this mental illness and stopped drinking as part of her self-diagnosis. She knows now that she does not have BPD and finds it amazing that she felt relieved at the thought of having a severe mental illness rather than alcohol use disorder. Having reduced her alcohol consumption, Whitaker began to see how useless and often stressful drinking was. For instance, she went out with a friend who got very drunk, picked up annoying men, and then started a huge argument with Whitaker in the street. 

Around this time, Whitaker read Allen Carr’s book, “The Easy Way,” which instructs the reader to control their alcohol consumption by simply not drinking at all. She decided to follow this advice and was surprised at her friends’ and colleagues’ negative reactions to it. After a couple of months of success, Whitaker drank when she was at a work party and felt that she could only pursue a romantic relationship with a colleague if she was inebriated. The next morning, Whitaker was hungover and deeply depressed. She realized that her binge drinking had to stop and quit alcohol for good.

The author remembers when she went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and later told her friends that she was an alcoholic. While this label helped her to explain why she stopped drinking altogether, she felt burdened by the shame of the label, especially since she knew that many of her drinking friends had the same dysfunctional relationship with alcohol that she had.

The author argues that society should stop using terms like “alcoholic,” as it simply stigmatizes and embarrasses the subset of drinkers who are willing to admit that they have a problem with alcohol. Instead of wondering if they fit the profile of someone with alcohol use disorder, people should instead ask themselves if alcohol is impacting their life in negative ways. The author lists 10 reasons why she believes society should retire the word “alcoholic.”