Brad Pitt is drinking again. As a fellow alcoholic, I think he’s making a mistake

Brad Pitt has started drinking again and this really is cause for celebration among millions of ordinary people around the world, because after all, what brings us closer to the great and famous, but our vices?

I have often heard people who enjoy a glass of cognac in the morning point out that Winston Churchill used to do much the same, but when asked in what other respects they resemble the First Lord of the Admiralty, twice British prime minister, and Nobel Prize winner, they usually have less to say. And now, if Brad Pitt has started drinking again, perhaps he has become a little closer to us ordinary people, or perhaps we have become closer to him.

But if Pitt has started drinking again, there must have been a reason he stopped, given in 2019, Pitt spoke openly about giving up alcohol. “I’d taken it as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he said, and by then, he had been sober for about three years.

The decision followed the notorious 2016 confrontation aboard a private jet carrying Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and their children from Europe to the United States. Just look at the problems stars have – even the family rows take place aboard private jets. According to Jolie’s account, Pitt spilled beer on her, grabbed and shook her, and behaved aggressively towards their children. The FBI investigated the incident, although Pitt was not charged and Jolie filed for divorce shortly afterwards, while Pitt stopped drinking.

Of course, it wasn’t as though he had accidentally got drunk for the first time in his life that day, and the point isn’t how much someone consumes on one particular occasion, it’s the cumulative effect. Alcohol can erode a person’s character slowly and gradually, so gradually that the person himself may barely notice, with good physical health, professional success, wealth, and modern medicine allowing someone with a serious drinking problem to remain highly functional for an extraordinarily long time.

Brad Pitt was never found unconscious under a fence and that particular image is worth mentioning because, in our society, lying under a fence is traditionally regarded as the definitive proof that someone has finally become an alcoholic. But alcoholism rarely looks like that, and many people with serious alcohol problems remain successful, go to work, raise families, and are seldom seen visibly drunk. However, money and status don’t change what ethanol does to the human body.

Pitt himself has been remarkably candid about his past, such as when in a 2017 interview, he said that after leaving college he could not remember a period when he was not drinking or using something. He has described alcohol as a means of escaping his feelings and problems, and once joked that he could drink a Russian under the table with his own vodka and a Frenchman with his own wine. It’s not much to boast about, but we Russians certainly understand the cultural context in which such things become a source of pride.

Then came sobriety, but now, according to a recent interview, Pitt has begun allowing himself an occasional drink again. Bottles were noticed at his home, and when asked about them he reportedly described what he was doing as “moderate drinking.”

Here’s what I would tell you, dear Brad Pitt, should you ever care to listen: those morning cognac drinkers are no more Churchill than I am Brad Pitt. I’ve never appeared in a film, I’ve never seen Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston up close, I’ve won neither an Oscar nor a Golden Globe, millions of female admirers have never written to me, and advertisers have somehow resisted offering me multimillion-dollar contracts.But there’s one respect in which you and I are not merely similar but indistinguishable, because illness is wonderfully democratic and dear Brad, I too am an alcoholic.

You are 62 years old and by my standards, you possess an almost unlimited amount of money and access to the finest medical care in the world, but you know something as well as I do, for an alcoholic, the idea of “moderate drinking” is a dangerous one. A person who returns to alcohol after years of sobriety doesn’t necessarily return as the person he was before he began drinking, but decades of habits and associations are still there.

That’s the insidious thing about alcoholism as gradually, every important event becomes connected with alcohol. Celebration means alcohol, disappointment means alcohol, meeting friends means alcohol, being alone means alcohol, and success, failure, boredom, anxiety, holidays, funerals, Friday evenings all mean alcohol. Eventually the brain finds a reason to drink in almost everything.

And Hollywood, I imagine, provides more reasons than most places because they certainly know how to drink there, with beautiful houses, beautiful glasses, expensive bottles, and hard-earned dollars. It all looks considerably more elegant than the man under the Russian fence, but the chemical inside the bottle remains much the same.

The way out begins with understanding that life is richer, more interesting, and ultimately more fulfilling than the experiences alcohol promises us. Pitt already knows this and he’s spoken about Alcoholics Anonymous and about the men he met there with considerable affection and respect.

Seven years of sobriety is no small achievement, but neither are three decades of drinking habits easily erased, so think again, Brad. Remember that flight from Europe. Remember the row with your family and the beer spilled over your wife, remember the moment when you decided that enough was enough and, in your own excellent phrase, revoked your own drinking privileges.

Perhaps there was wisdom in that decision that shouldn’t now be discarded simply because enough time has passed to make the past seem less dangerous. There’s an English expression about “falling off the wagon.” Don’t fall off the wagon, Brad, because it’s much harder to climb back on.

This article was first published by Gazeta.ru, translated and edited by RT team