Drinking

AS COLLEGES throughout the country struggle to find ways to curb student drinking, Goucher College in Towson is offering a creative solution: its own nonalcoholic nightclub.The Gopher Hole is not your typical college hangout. Patrons don't dress to impress. Often they arrive in pajamas or sweats. They come for the music, the poetry and the prose. They come to gossip, to meet old friends or to make new ones.But most of all, they come for the coffee.The club, open six nights a week in in the basement of Mary Fisher Hall, holds no liquor license.

"Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker," by Susan Cheever. Simon & Schuster. 192 pages. $23.Susan Cheever has written another affecting memoir of autobiographical speculation. This time she focuses on how alcoholism ruled her life for close to 50 years. Her father, short story writer John Cheever, was famously alcoholic and Cheever reveals how the landscape of her early life was colored by drinking. When she was 6, her Cheever grandmother taught her "how to make a perfect dry martini."

The Alcoholic Beverage Hearing Board of Howard County fined two establishments a total of $1,450 for violating local liquor laws and a bar in Woodstock $360 for buying cigarettes out of state to resell in Maryland.The five-member board voted unanimously to fine M.D 's Country Pub in the 3900 block of Ten Oaks Road in Glenelg $1,250 for several violations in a six-day span last November.A county police officer found six customers inside the restaurant drinking alcohol around 3:30 a.m. Nov. 15.Establishments that sell liquor are prohibited from selling alcohol or allowing patrons to continue drinking after 2 a.m.Six days later, the same police officer entered the bar around 2:15 a.m.The officer said he saw three customers - all under the legal drinking age of 21 - consuming alcohol.

The Howard County Alcoholic Beverages Hearing Board was scheduled to review liquor violations involving two area bars last night.M.D.'s Country Pub in the 3900 block of Ten Oaks Road in Glenelg was cited for several violations within a six-day span in November.A county police officer investigating a complaint at 3: 30 a.m. Nov. 15 saw two people enter the restaurant. The officer followed them and found six customers drinking alcohol.Establishments that sell liquor are prohibited from selling alcohol or allowing patrons to continue drinking after 2 a.m.Six days later, the same officer entered the bar about 2: 15 a.m. and saw three customers -- all under the legal drinking age of 21 -- consuming alcohol at the bar.This is the second time in three years that M.D.'s Country Pub has been accused of violating local liquor laws.

Baltimore police swept the park in front of City Hall Friday and Saturday nights, handing out 14 citations for having open containers of alcohol, routing six squatters from cardboard boxes and charging five people on a variety of minor charges."

IT'S 5 O'CLOCK, the witching hour for mothers. Do you know where your corkscrew is?If a woman is at home, she is about to start dinner and the kids choose exactly that moment to press all her buttons. If she is walking in the door from work, she must make the transition to home life without taking a breath.A drink can be the elevator down. It is a way to relieve the pressure, to quiet the anxieties, to take the edge off. A way to not mind so much.A woman may have only one drink. And she may have it only at that one chaotic time of day. But she probably fears it, because she fears that it might mean she is an alcoholic, and all of us have been touched in some way by alcoholism.

Buoyed by support on the federal level, a group of safety activists plans to push this winter for state legislation that would lower the limit at which a driver in Maryland is considered drunk.The effort has advantages that were lacking last winter, when a similar measure failed.In October, the Clinton administration endorsed a federal proposal to penalize states that don't lower their drunken-driving threshold to a blood-alcohol level of .08 percent, the limit being sought in Maryland.The state effort also has the support of the Maryland State Police.

Focusing on a little-known problem, a new Johns Hopkins University study says that almost a third of the bicyclists killed in Maryland had been drinking alcohol, most to the point of being legally intoxicated.The research, which could apply to cycling nationally, also shows that 13 percent of the cyclists seriously injured in accidents were drunk.While drunken motorists have attracted intense public attention -- because of the carnage they create and their ability to harm the innocent -- the intoxicated bicyclist has largely escaped notice and scientific study.

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- John Daly's battle with alcoholism has taken a turn for the worse.The mercurial Daly withdrew from The Players Championship after one round. His excuse was a sore hip, but that was apparently just a front for the erratic behavior that has hampered his career. Daly has checked into the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs, Calif."As part of my ongoing battle to overcome alcoholism, I have decided to immediately enter the Betty Ford Alcohol Rehabilitation Program," Daly said in a statement released by the PGA. "In August of 1996, I suffered a setback in dealing with my disease.

Howard County police and a group of teen-agers start a recent Friday night with the same mission: looking for a party. Under cover of darkness, the two missions converge at 11: 30 p.m. in secluded woods in Scaggsville -- the police officers with badges and flashlights, the 15 youths with beer and liquor.It's another night on what some call the "party patrol," a two-year police program targeting underage drinking that has caught hundreds of Howard County teen-agers in fields, homes and even driveways illegally drinking alcohol or being at a party where it was served.

In May, Kelley Washington was an unemployed wide receiver, tripped up by his own medical charts. The job market was tight, and the former Tennessee star was reduced to accepting tryouts, the NFL equivalent of bargain-basement shopping. Six months later, he is the missing piece in the Ravens' offensive puzzle, the slot receiver who keeps drives going with clutch third-down catches over the middle. All Washington had to do was wipe out a six-year history of chronic injury and unfulfilled potential.

Go see Doug Stanhope at the Ottobar on Friday night, and chances are you'll be angered, outraged, maybe even ticked off beyond all sense of reason. With luck, you'll laugh, too. He is, after all, the comic whose profile in a 2006 issue of British GQ was headlined, "Is This America's Most Depraved Man?" As a comic, he's following in the footsteps of such angry young men as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks and Lewis Black, ignoring conventions of good taste, cracking jokes about things both hallowed and profane, never meeting a sacred cow he didn't want to gore.

The owners of a popular Columbia nightspot were fined $500 for serving alcohol to minors after a fight in the parking lot led police to two underage men who had been drinking inside before the altercation. The incident at 2 a.m. May 10 brought several officers to Nottingham's, in the 8800 block of Stanford Blvd., where they found a semiconscious man in the parking lot and three people in a silver Honda trying to drive away. The Honda driver sped in reverse at high speed after seeing the patrol car, hitting a curb, Officer Timothy Kane testified.

Owners of a North Laurel tavern were fined $175 by the Howard County Alcoholic Beverage Hearing Board for allowing people to drink inside after the 2 a.m. closing time Nov. 11, and for keeping the blinds closed, which is a violation of county rules. Jeffrey Hunt, one of the owners of the Game Sports Bar and Grill in the 11200 block of Scaggsville Road, Laurel, was on the premises that morning when county police Cpl. Martin Johnson found the blinds closed and several people drinking beer at 2:15 a.m. The incident was a mistake, the owners said, and would not happen again.

Just about anyone who has attended a too-rowdy party knows the scene: Someone begins drinking and doesn't know when to stop. Rambunctious behavior, slurred words, an uneven gait and sometimes even unconsciousness follows. While drinking in moderation can be pleasurable, drinking too much can lead to alcohol poisoning, a severe and potentially fatal reaction to an overdose. Too much alcohol can shut down parts of the brain that control the gag reflex (which prevents choking) and breathing, says McRae Williams, an emergency-room physician at Greater Baltimore Medical Center.

A popular bar on Main Street in Ellicott City that is undergoing renovation and upgrading food offerings in hopes of attracting new customers was fined $250 by the Howard County Alcoholic Beverage Hearing Board for an underage-drinking incident. Jane Johnson and Marsha Greenfield, licensees for the Judge's Bench, agreed to a statement of facts concerning an incident May 25 in which county police Detective Martin Johnson found three young women in the bar who admitted they were 20 years old and had fake driver's licenses.

A NASA review has found that on at least two occasions, astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons warned that they were so drunk they posed a safety risk, according to an influential aviation trade journal. An independent committee appointed by NASA in February also reported "heavy use of alcohol" by astronauts within the standard 12 hours before launch when flight crews are prohibited from drinking, according to Aviation Week & Space Technology. NASA refused to comment on the Aviation Week article.

I chanced across a Real World: Denver catch-up show this past weekend, and how sad was that? A show that was once (albeit a long time ago now) about social interaction and people from different backgrounds learning to live with one another has degenerated into what feels like a zoo monitored by Webcams. This season seems to be about mating and fighting and screaming and drinking -- with a side of gossiping and back-stabbing that makes the show look like a psychological experiment a la Big Brother.

In addition to claiming lives, marriages, homes and careers, alcoholism has a greedy way of robbing its victims of brainpower as well. Over time, alcohol dependence literally shrinks the brain and several of its components. And in so doing, it erodes an alcoholic's ability to learn new tasks, remember things and organize for action. Even regular, heavy drinking can take a cognitive toll, researchers have found. But a new study published in the journal Brain details the remarkable ability of the thinking organ to regenerate itself and regain function when its host chooses sobriety.

More than a 100 people gathered in Easton the other day to talk about and remember William Robert Miller - more familiarly known as Bob Miller - a recovering alcoholic who in turning his life around helped and inspired others to do the same. Miller, 92, who was a former director of Baltimore's Tuerk House and a former program director for the National Council on Alcoholism, died Nov. 6. "It was Bob who packed that room. It was standing room only and the staff ran out of chairs," said Lucy L. Howard, a 30-year recovering alcoholic.