Ah, well. I stand corrected. Consistently drunk people are supposed to realize they've a problem and get working on it? My experience has been that it is very difficult to get an actively using/drinking individual to see their own behavior. Much like some people having heart attacks--they are in denial, "Oh, it's just heartburn..." they put it off and put it off and finally they keel over and somebody calls 911. Or, should we say, "He was responsible for getting treatment himself."--?

All I'm saying is that there is a difference between the getting drunk all of the time and being an alcoholic. It's a hard distinction to make sometimes.

Just curious, TS. How does one make that distinction? Isn't that the definition of an alcoholic - someone who gets drunk all the time? And according to what someone posted earlier, it wasn't like BOTH these guys didn't already get a wake up call. So how do you figure? :confused:

the easiest way i have ever found to explain it is - do you need to drink or do you want to drink? drunks want, alcoholics need.

I dunno... that sounds a lot to me like "I can quit anytime I want to."

i don't know about anyone else, but it worked that way in my head. for a period of 4-5 years, i drank 8/9 pints of guinness and maybe a shot or two of something pretty much every night. my theory was that if i was an alcoholic that meant i needed a drink. on the nights that i didn't go out and have a few i never had issues and it wasn't a difficult situation. when my wife got pregnant, she couldn't couldn't have anything to drink so i just stopped drinking. no issues. i didn't have anything to drink for about 2 years and now i have a beer or two on occasion but not often. from what i understand if i was an alcoholic the stopping would have been a difficult process. i may be mistaken though. again, my path isn't for everyone and all that jazz.

That's interesting. You hear a lot about people with "addictive personalities," but I've always wondered about the opposite condition. Extreme detachment, I guess you'd call it. With regards to my body, I definitely fall into that latter category--my freshman year in college, I lost weight instead of gaining the typical "freshman fifteen" because often I was too lazy to get up and go to the cafeteria. I could go to sleep with my stomach grumbling, just tune it out. But I wonder if maybe emotional detachment goes along with having a non-addictive personality?

From what I understand, addiction is a sort of complex mix of genes and environment. You have a given number of genes, let's just say 8, for the sake of discussion, that can be turned off or on for addiction. Then you throw in environmental factors on top of that. So a person who is born with all 8 addiction genes turned off could be raised by a couple of drunks, loose their entire family in a car wreck, be homeless on the street and still not turn to alcohol. On the other hand, someone born with all 8 genes turned on could be raised somewhere where alcohol doesn't even exist, travel out to the real world at age 21, have one drink and be addicted from that time on. Most of us fall in the middle of those two extremes. I think that how it works, anyhow.

Alcoholism does tend to run in the family. Of course it doesn't mean you WILL become an alcoholic, you just run a higher risk of it...like high blood pressure or allergies. A friend of mine's father is one in a family long known to have drinking problems and I think he described it to me well. He said that when the alcohol gets into his system, something in his head clicks and he feels 'just right' and the more he drinks the better he feels in his head. However, when the alcohol starts to get metabolized and leaves his system, he feels increasingly 'not right' and wants to drink again to 'feel alright' again. Once it passes, he feels fine again. He does drink, but only on occasions like birthdays, Xmas, wedding anniversary and the like. He's very aware that he could turn into a raging alcoholic but refuses to let himself do it...mainly because he watched his own father drink himself to death. Alcoholic poisoning.

It is a complex issue, and almost everything or anything in your life can be a factor, genetic predispostion to chemical dependence, genetic predispostion to addictive personality, social conditions in both the family and larger in-group, availability of alcohol, etc., etc.

An important question to ask though is whether the distinction between drunk and alcoholic is really that important. I'd rather work with an alcoholic who comes to work everyday and then goes home and drinks himself unconscious than deal with kids like these who let an inability to control their excesses get one of them killed.

My own experience is similar to lookout's. For me, it was drinking too much in college. I got drunk 2-3 times a week. Once I left that environment, I became a responsble, moderate drinker. Now I only drink a couple beers at a time, and do it infrequently.

A casual observer might have thought I was an alcoholic back then, but I don't think I was. I'm certainly not one now.

that's a great way to explain it, and you're right, most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

i guess i should point out that i was never a fall down drunk. although i consumed a high volume of alcohol, it was usually over a 5 hour or more period of time. in fact most of my friends at the time would get pissed at me because i never appeared intoxicated and never got hungover. i was always buzzed but i drank slowly so i was never loaded. at the same time i would see folks stroll into the bar slam 5 beers and a shot in a one hour, get completely loaded, act stupid and i would be thinking to myself "wow, they have a problem."

Another thing I have noticed about alcoholics (and I've known several over the course of my life, some in recovery, some not) is that an alcoholic without fail will remember their first drink in precise detail. Like, "I was 16, it was the homecoming dance, and me and the guys got hold of a 5th of Jack Daniels"). Most people without a propensity to become alcoholic will only have a sort of vague memory of their first drink, "Hmmm, well, I suppose it would have been during my time at college. I can't really remember what I had. Probably a beer at a kegger or something.")