Sirona
I've heard that alcoholics can't have one drink because the one drink automatically "pushes a button" which means that they have to continue drinking available alcohol until they pass out or run out of alcohol? Do you know of any studies about this? What is the physical "cause" of this?
Well, my knowledge mostly, apart from the examples I mention, concern substances other than alcohol.
However, withdrawl from alcohol can give you physiological symptoms just as much as withdrawl from heroin can.
As for the 'single drink' theory, this may be true for some people and I understand it is accepted wisdom under AA philosophy. However, the gentleman I refered to earlier recovered through other therapy and can drink 'normally', albeit with mindfulness and caution nowadays.
The 'drink until it's all gone' thing is unlikely to be physical, but an uncontrollable psychological (to that person) compulsion. The person is aware of what they are doing but are incapable of stopping themselves, and the effect of inhibition reduction of alcohol on any human will make the ability to stop themselves reduce as they drink.
This 'choice' thing some people insist on...
Again, some can control their attraction/compulsion for alcohol. Others can't. This doesn't mean the person who can't "chose" to be lying in an ally in sub-zero temperatures reeking of their own piss
Imagine! "Okay, if you want to be a college graduate working in Silicon Valley put your hand up? Okay, line on the right. Okay, hands up if you want to be a wino? Okay, line on the left... ".
Choice is too fluffy a word to use; it implies there is a totally free choice made from a level playing field by uniform people. A childish simplification, albeit one that allows nice levels of self-rightousness. Golly, what's that about old habits dying hard? Seems alcoholics aren't the only ones who need to work on self-control...
Even those who say that it is a choice use phrases like "His body had a terrible addiction to alcohol" contrasting with "Fact of it is, most of them just liked getting drunk. All of them could control the drinking... ". Addiction implies lack of control! The very explanation of an opinion defining alcoholism as a choice contradicts that same opinion.
I think Ross has a good point when he says "People can choose to put themselves at risk", but they may not be aware of the risk of the choices they make. It's easy enough; those of us who joined the JW's of our own 'free will' thought we knew what we were doing when in fact we were putting ourselves at risk. With some people, they don't know something as simple as having a drink is what will eventualy put them at risk.
I have a sneaking suspisicon that those who dispute the genuine lack of control of an addict have never been one or met one who was active in their addiction. Once again it is a spectrum of behaviour/affliction; lack of control doesn't mean no control nor does it mean someone cannot be helped.
Someone with a tendancy to alcoholism might have other parts of his individual physiological and mental make-up that allow him to combat it. That doesn't mean everyone with that tendancy has the other internal factors that allow them to control that desire.
To argue otherwise is like saying that ALL people who are attracted to children commit sexual offenses against children. That's utter nonsence; ask anyone who knows about the subject and you'll realise there must be many others with the same desires but have the ability to control them.
And that ability to control action is NOT the same as a simplistic division between good and bad.
It's interesting that those who are most condemnatory towards alcoholics are those making assertions it is purely choice (which ignores a lot of data), and who keep on acting like people always are in full control of what they do (which ignores a lot of data). Not one person seeking to condemn alcohlics as people who make a free choice has done ANYTHING other than assert it; no proof, no backing, just their opinion, which of course they are entitled to...
I have seen a friend of mine go into and out of alcohol addiction. I have seen her twin brother suffer the same. I've seen someone so deep in denial they had reached Lake Victoria, insisting they had no problem the night after I had searched railway tracks under bridges for her body (she'd rung me from the railway station in a cry for help, but not been where she said she'd be when I got there).
I eventually found her in an allyway, unconcious with an empty bottle of brandy (100lbs girl), and carrying her home to sleep it off on my lap in her parent's living room (boy did her dad get a surprise the following morning... ). A 20 year-old girl, with a dozen empty bottles scattered round her room; sweet, intelligent, worked in an Old People's home, a total drunk, and totally lost and unreachable.
P.S. She isn't now