People freely choose to drink – Part II

This is Part II of Old Ideas About Addiction.

How can addiction be a brain disease when people freely choose to drink or do drugs? Doesn’t this relieve the addict of all responsibility? This is a common rebuttal when discussing addiction. If we go down this road, we’ll find that many diseases are the result of people’s behaviors, such as smoking, eating habits, sexual behavior, lack of exercise, etc. Let’s just discuss drinking and addiction to alcohol for simplicity’s sake, but it can be true of opiate painkillers, nicotine, caffeine, benzodiazepines (nerve pills), and other drugs to which people can become addicted.

People start drinking alcohol for many reasons — socializing, experimentation, relaxing after work, peer pressure in high school and college, or just because so many other people drink and the person wants to fit in, especially with work associates. Most people can look back at their first drink of an alcoholic beverage and it was probably innocent and harmless. You might get sick in the beginning, but you learn to drink, and most people find they can take or leave alcohol.

No one sets out to be an alcoholic. I don’t know of anyone who started drinking to become an alcoholic. It’s definitely an old idea to think that alcoholics enjoy their drinking in the middle and late stages — the drinking at some point becomes a necessity in their mind that keeps them from falling apart and going into serious withdrawals. This is not fun — it’s painful and soul-crushing survival. Just because you see someone who’s an alcoholic while they’re drinking, appearing drunk and having a good old time, this is a snapshot and I can assure you that there are consequences you don’t see — physical complications, relationship problems and states of mind no one wants to experience.

Research has shown that for some people, when they start drinking, they develop a different relationship toward alcohol. It can happen over months or over years or decades, but the person eventually loses control over how much they drink. The alcoholic in the early stages sets out at times to drink a few drinks then go home but stays at the bar until closing. When asked why, the alcoholic might give a lame excuse, but when the alcoholic are forced to be honest, they’ll say they don’t why — they felt compelled to have one more, then one more, then lost all control until they were drunk.

This type of drinking doesn’t happen every time in the early stage of alcoholism, but the alcoholic can never tell when it will happen, and it happens more often as time goes by. The alcoholic will over-drink at parties and embarrass herself and anyone with her. The alcoholic will find the compulsion to drink getting worse over time. There are many signs and symptoms and that develop over time, but the point is that the alcoholic is not choosing to experience these consequences or this progression of insane drinking — only someone deranged would want to live this way.

Why doesn’t the alcoholic just stop, if the drinking is so painful? Well, we’ll talk about that in the next post.