Queenan writes in his memoir that his writing career took off when he quit drinking.
His second "My Turn" column for Newsweek "was an all-out assault on alcoholics in general and my father in particular. It recounted the beatings, the terror, the rationalizations, the halfhearted handshake. It was uncompromising and vicious, taking direct aim at AA and its army of smarmy self-congratulators. …I knew that reinventing alcoholism as a medical condition was despicable. Physiologically, alcohol was not an especially addictive drug: it was certainly much less addictive than cocaine or nicotine. Everyone who put a glass of liquor to his lips knew exactly what he was doing; it was not like coming down with malaria because you’d strayed into the wrong jungle.
"…The vast majority of alcoholics used liquor as a socially sanctioned medication enabling them to pretend that they were not hte people they so obviously were." (pg. 307, 308)
