There are a lot of good reasons to be driven to drink. Like the decision to move to Pattaya. That’s a what comes first, the chicken or the egg scenario; is it that alcoholics find Thailand’ Sin City their cup of tea with a strong shot in it, or is it that once you live there you turn to alcohol to wipe out the stench of your miserable existence? Sexpats have a rep for spending countless hours drowning their sorrows. Or is it that they just want to get plastered enough to not remember what those sorrows are?

Pattaya’ gotta look better behind a fog of alcoholic bliss. And the street urchins who work in its gogo bar have gotta look better then too. A cheap bottle of gin will always cure what ails you, and if you don’t remember what you did the night before, that’s probably a good thing. So do Pattaya’ sexpats drink to escape? Or did they escape to drink themselves silly?

Yup, smells like science to me.

Severine Sabia of the University College London says those who are fond of killing off their liver as quickly as possible probably don’t remember why they drink in the first place. “Men who consume more than two alcoholic drinks per day while in middle age may speed up their memory loss in later life by up to six years,” she says.

Sabia conducted a study of more than 5,000 middle-aged men who were interviewed about their drinking habits. Then they underwent memory and other cognitive tests beginning at an average age of 56. These tests were repeated twice over the next 10 years to see if there was a correlation between age, memory loss, and being a boozer. While her research found there were no differences in memory or mental function between non-drinkers and those who drank less than two drinks per day, in those who poured three or more drinks down their throat daily, mental abilities declined between one-and-a-half to six years faster than in those who had fewer drinks per day.

“Our study focused on middle-aged participants and suggests that heavy drinking is associated with faster decline in all areas of cognitive function in men,” says Sabia, who published the results of her study in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The steepest decline in mental functions were found in men who . . . um . . . eh . . . sorry. I forgot what I was writing about.

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