2023-08-11 19:04:25
Asmaa is a bartender. She officiates in Allal Ben Abdellah Street. She doesn’t know if she is an alcoholic, but she can say that she drinks every night and a lot. “Sometimes I’m knocked out. I do not remember anything. It’s the black hole. And often, I am pocketed and some abuse me.
Asmaa has been drinking since the age of seventeen. Today she is forty-four, and she looks sixty. The tanned complexion, the mouth that turns blue, the blackened gums, the bags under the eyes that give the look a kind of tinge of wickedness and a plumpness that does not bother her.
“I’m not the only one, in all the bars there are girls like me who work like that. It’s the only way to make a living and I must say that I’m ashamed that society calls me a bitch, but hey, you have to eat well. Yes, there are girls who are also the hustler, but I have two children and I can not afford that.
And to the question, if she drank outside of working days at the bar, Asmaa answers: “I drink all the time, I’m used to it. I need my beers, my pastis, my red and sometimes I take vodka when it’s a customer who offers it to me”.
Habit is precisely alcoholism. As a specialist, psychiatrist and addictologist points out: We need to clarify a point that remains ambiguous for many: there is the occasional use of alcohol, alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence. . All three stages can be dangerous. But in case of addiction, it gives rise to a whole series of diseases, physical deficiencies, especially in the liver and nervous system.
The other damage that few people know is that alcoholism can lead to sexual impotence. What should also be remembered is that alcohol consumption is a danger in pregnant women because it risks causing malformations to the fetus. That said, without necessarily being a form of alcohol dependence, a massive consumption of alcohol at once can cause what is called an alcoholic coma, that is to say an intoxication that can lead to death. . To sum up, let’s say that alcohol dependence gives rise to the following damage: cirrhosis, cancer, road accidents, suicides, alcoholic hepatitis, but also homicides, accidents at work… and other serious offences”.
When we list all these dangers to Asmaa, she winks and makes a clear gesture that means: I don’t care. And after ? “I saw thousands of people drinking like holes, liters of beer and bottles of crap wine and I still see them. They are not dead”. Not yet. And is that a life, spending your days and nights in a bar, in a tavern, in a hole drinking yourself into a coma? This is slow suicide. But for Asmaa, the essential is elsewhere. You have to drink so as not to “see the time pass, to endure the long hours of service, so as not to plant a shard of a bottle in the mouth of so and so, to finish his shift and bring back something to cook the pot on the following day”.
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#ravages #drugs #Morocco #Female #alcoholism #Asmaa #bartender