« Reply #173 on: March 17, 2010, 05:53:24 AM »
:shamrock: :shamrock:
I was thinking about this post above and it occurred to me that I may not be a alcoholic after all I'm Irish and that explains it. At least 50% anyway the rest was imported.
Seriously so many have studied the Alcoholic and produced results saying it is genetics, a lack of spirituality, disease and now social teaching.
Now this last one social importation. Hmmm I am not exactly sure if I understand this. I wonder if it has anything to do with what are children are being taught about drugs and alcohol today on a higher plane, subliminally by the actions happening around them. The troubled teen industry is filled with children/young adults with alcohol and drug abuse problems. I understand that this belies another latent problem yet before the real problem is addressed you can have alcoholism and addiction to drugs.
I don't know if I have been able to get my point across but I guess the long and short of it is this. What are we teaching are young Americans today about drugs and alcohol and is this affecting their growth.
Danny.......
:shamrock: :shamrock:
Wow. For the first time I agree with much (though not all) of what you're saying. It doesn't mean you should go out and drink, though. If you have a drinking problem it's probably better to be safe than sorry and abstain completely. Once you pick up a habit, it's hard to undo. Once you pick up certain beliefs, such as powerlessness, it's hard to "un-believe". It can be done, as Moderation Management and Stanton Peele argue, but it's difficult. The fact is that you don't need alcohol to live. If you've had problems with drinking in the past, it's just common sense that you should avoid it, especially if your prior attempts to moderate have failed.
Here's another
excerpt about genetics you might enjoy:
The Genetics of Alcoholism
AA originally claimed that alcoholics inherit an "allergy" to alcohol that underlies their loss of control when they drink. Today this particular idea has been discarded. Nonetheless, a tremendous investment has been made in the search for biological inheritances that may cause alcoholism, while many grandiose claims have been made about the fruits of this search. In 1987, almost two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) agreed that "alcoholism can be hereditary"; only five years earlier, in 1982, more people had disagreed (50 percent) than agreed (40 percent) with this statement. Furthermore, it is the better educated who agree most with this statement.15 Yet widely promulgated and broadly accepted claims about the inheritance of alcoholism are inaccurate, and important data from genetic research call into doubt the significance of genetic influences on alcoholism and problem drinking. Moreover, prominent genetic researchers themselves indicate that cultural and environmental influences are the major determinants of most drinking problems, even for the minority of alcoholics who they believe have a genetic component to their drinking.
Popular works now regularly put forward the theory — presented as fact — that the inherited cause of alcoholism has been discovered. In the words of Durk Pearson and Sandra Shaw, the authors of Life Extension, "Alcohol addiction is not due to weak will or moral depravity; it is a genetic metabolic defect... [just like the] genetic metabolic defect resulting in gout." One version of this argument appeared in the newsletter of the Alcoholism Council of Greater New York:
Someone like the derelict. . . , intent only on getting sufficient booze from the bottle poised upside-down on his lips. . . [is] the victim of metabolism, a metabolism the derelict is born with, a metabolic disorder that causes excessive drinking.16
Is it really possible that street inebriates are destined from the womb to become alcoholics? Don't they really have a choice in the matter, or any alternatives? Don't their upbringings, or their personal and social values, have any impact on this behavior?
Several well-publicized studies have found that close biological relatives of alcoholics are more likely to be alcoholics themselves. The best-known research of this kind, examining Danish adoptees, was published in the early 1970s by psychiatrist Donald Goodwin and his colleagues. The researchers found that male adoptees with alcoholic biological parents became alcoholics three to four times more often than adoptees without alcoholic relatives. This research has several surprising elements to it, however. In the first place, only 18 percent of the males with alcoholic biological parents became alcoholics themselves (compared with 5 percent of those without alcoholic parentage). Note that, accepting this study at face value, the vast majority of men whose fathers are alcoholics do not become alcoholic solely because of biological inheritance.17
Some might argue that Goodwin's definition of alcoholism is too narrow and that the figures in his research severely understate the incidence of alcoholism. Indeed, there was an additional group of problem drinkers whom Goodwin and his colleagues identified, and many people might find it hard to distinguish when a drinker fell in this rather than in the alcoholic group. However, more of the people in the problem drinking group did not have alcoholic parents than did! If alcoholic and heavy problem drinkers are combined, as a group they are not more likely to be offspring of alcoholic than of nonalcoholic parents, and the finding of inherited differences in alcoholism rates disappears from this seminal study. One last noteworthy result of the Goodwin team's research: in a separate study using the same methodology as the male offspring study, the investigators did not find that daughters of alcoholic parents more often became alcoholic themselves (in fact, there were more alcoholic women in the group without alcoholic parents).18
Other studies also discourage global conclusions about inheritance of alcoholism. One is by a highly respected research group in Britain under Robin Murray, dean of the Institute of Psychiatry at Maudsley Hospital. Murray and his colleagues compared the correlation between alcoholism in identical twins with that between fraternal twins. Since the identical pair are more similar genetically, they should more often be alcoholic or nonalcoholic together than twins whose relationships are genetically equivalent to ordinary siblings. No such difference appeared. Murray and his colleagues and others have surveyed the research on inheritance of alcoholism.19 According to a longtime biological researcher in alcoholism, David Lester, these reviews "suggest that genetic involvement in the etiology of alcoholism. . . is weak at best." His own review of the literature, Lester wrote, "extends and. . . strengthens these previous judgments." Why, then, are genetic viewpoints so popular? For Lester, the credibility given genetic views is "disproportionate with their theoretical and empirical warrant," and the "attraction and persistence of such views lies in their conformity with ideological norms."
Several studies of male children of alcoholics (including two ongoing Danish investigations) have not found that these children drink differently as young adults or adolescents from their cohorts without alcoholic relatives.20 These children of alcoholics are not generally separated from their parents, and we know that for whatever reason, male children brought up by their alcoholic parents more often will be alcoholic themselves. What this tells us is that these children aren't born as alcoholics but develop their alcoholism over the years. In the words of George Vaillant, who followed the drinking careers of a large group of men over forty years:
The present prospective study offers no credence to the common belief that some individuals become alcoholics after the first drink. The progression from alcohol use to abuse takes years.21
What, then, do people inherit that keeps them drinking until they become alcoholics? Milam asserts in Under the Influence that the source of alcoholism is acetaldehyde, a chemical produced when the body breaks down alcohol. Some research has found higher levels of this chemical in children of alcoholics when they drink22; other research (like the two Danish prospective studies) has not. Such discrepancies in research results also hold for abnormalities in brain waves that various teams of researchers have identified in children of alcoholics — some find one EEG pattern, while other researchers discover a distinct but different pattern.23 Psychiatrist Mare Schuckit, of the University of California at San Diego Medical School, found no such differences between young men from alcoholic families and a matched comparison group, leading him to "call into question. . . the replicability and generalizability" of cognitive impairments and neuropsychologic deficits "as part of a predisposition toward alcoholism."24
Washington University psychiatrist Robert Cloninger (along with several other researchers) claims that an inherited antisocial or crime-prone personality often leads to both criminality and alcoholism in men.25 On the other hand, antisocial acting out when drinking, as well as criminality, are endemic to certain social and racial groups — particularly young working-class and ghetto males.26 The Cloninger view gets into the slippery realm of explaining that the underprivileged and ghettoized are born the way they are. In addition, Schuckit has failed to find any differences in antisocial temperament or impulsiveness to differentiate those who come from alcoholic families and those without alcoholic siblings or parents.27 Instead, Schuckit believes, one — perhaps the — major mechanism that characterizes children of alcoholics is that these children are born with a diminished sensitivity to the effects of alcohol28 (although — once again — other researchers do not find this to be the case29).
In Schuckit's view, children of alcoholics have a built-in tolerance for alcohol — they experience less intoxication than other people when drinking the same amounts. (Note that this is the opposite of the original AA view that alcoholics inherit an allergy to alcohol.) In the Schuckit model, alcoholics might unwittingly drink more over long periods and thus build up a dependence on alcohol. But as a theory of alcoholism, where does this leave us? Why do these young men continue drinking for the years and decades Vaillant tells us it takes them to become alcoholics? And even if they can drink more without experiencing physical effects, why do they tolerate the various drinking problems, health difficulties, family complaints, and so on that occur on the road to alcoholism? Why don't they simply recognize the negative impact alcohol is having on their lives and resolve to drink less? Certainly, some people do exactly this, saying things like "I limit myself to one or two drinks because I don't like the way I act after I drink more."
One insight into how those with similar physiological responses to alcohol may have wholly different predispositions to alcoholism is provided by those who manifest "Oriental flush" — a heightened response to alcohol marked by a visible reddening after drinking that frequently characterizes Asians and Native Americans. Oriental flush has a biochemical basis in that Asian groups display higher acetaldehyde levels when they drink: here, many believe, is a key to alcoholism. But individuals from Asian backgrounds who flush do not necessarily drink more than — or differ in their susceptibility to drinking problems from — those who don't flush.30 Moreover, groups that show flushing have both the highest alcoholism rates (Native Americans and Eskimos) and the lowest rates (Chinese and Japanese) among ethnic groups in the United States. What distinguishes between how people in these two groups react to the same biological phenomenon? It would certainly seem that Eskimos' and Indians' abnegated state in America and their isolation from the American economic and achievement-oriented system inflate their alcoholism rates, while the low alcoholism rates of the Chinese and Japanese must be related to their achievement orientation and economic success in our society.
Not even genetically oriented researchers (as opposed to popularizers) deny that cultural and social factors are crucial in the development of alcoholism and that, in this sense, alcoholism is driven by values and life choices. Consider three quotes from prominent medical researchers. Mare Schuckit: "It is unlikely that there is a single cause for alcoholism. . . . At best, biologic factors explain only a part of " the alcoholism problem31; George Vaillant: "I think it [finding a biological marker for alcoholism] would be as unlikely as finding one for basketball playing. . . . The high number of children of alcoholics who become addicted, Vaillant believes, is due less to biological factors than to poor role models"32; Robert Cloninger: "The demonstration of the critical importance of sociocultural influences in most alcoholics suggests that major changes in social attitudes about drinking styles can change dramatically the prevalence of alcohol abuse regardless of genetic predisposition."33 In short, the idea that alcoholism is an inherited biological disease has been badly overstated, and according to some well-informed observers, is completely unfounded.
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To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.
[size=85]C.S. Lewis - The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment[/size]
