I say no but have no statistics to back it . The problem is that even moderate drinking will impair your ability made the choice to not have another.
I tried to cut back to moderation for about two years. Abject failure. Honestly it seems to have made it worse. A year ago I stopped altogether. That worked.
It amuses me that drinking as a life goal moves along unquestioned.
I have some numbers.
12 of them, in fact.
-Panda, ACOA
Not really. I am happy this isn’t becoming a thread on the merits of AA and I hope everyone keeps it that way. Those numbers line up with treated alcoholics in general, I don’t know the numbers of ones that were successful in moderation programs. Common sense says that it will be worse just because the threshold to failure is much closer if you drink at all.
The meaningful statistics start at about the 2, 5 and 10 year levels rather than the first year. Long-term alcoholism has some pretty severe physical and mental effects that only start to go away after about 6 - 18 months of total sobriety. That is how long it takes for the nervous system to recover. That is just physiological and not a value judgement. Any alcohol introduced during that time delays that recovery.
I’d like to see the sources for this, has there actually been studies done on those sticking with lets say the UK GP recommended max no more than 4 standard units in one day (and at least 2 days with no alcohol a week) versus teetotallers?
Being drunk is a reasonable life goal. Being relaxed through alcohol so as to interact with others (often similarly lubricated) is a reasonable life goal. Drinking with others so as to prove a point, no matter how silly it may be from a birds eye view of the human condition, is equally a reasonable life goal, at least in western society.
Who the heck drinks 4 units a day though? That’s barely drinking at all.
Thats the limits for Moderation Management as well:
http://www.moderation.org/readings.shtml#mmlimits
I can’t say personally anything about alcoholism, however like many I was once an addict to nicotine. Specifically smoking, I smoked those damn things for twenty years. I was certainly addicted, agitated if I didn’t have any and I would spend my last dollar on a pack and forgo food until payday if need be. Well, long story short, I got married two years ago. My wonderful wife made it very clear that she loved me, but would not marry me if I didn’t quit the smokes. So I went cold turkey and quit! Two years and I haven’t faltered (yes, it was a bitch and there were many times in the first couple of months I didn’t think I would make it).
I had in my mind when I quit that perhaps I could just be a casual smoker, the type to have one every now and then. Some of my friends were like that, they would go a couple of months without smoking and then we would go out for drinks and they would have one and then not touch another for months again. That’s how I wanted to be.
I
Fast forward to today. I haven’t had one in two years although there has been a few occasions when I really wanted one. I came close to lighting up but realized if I had even one I was finished and one would turn into two, two into four and then another twenty years of smoking (if I didn’t die first). The point being is that there is a huge difference between someone who likes an activity and someone who is an addict. While I am sure there are some that can get over an addiction and continue to enjoy they’re vice in moderation I am also sure that the addiction would pull most back into the black hole.
On a personal note to all of those thinking of quitting smoking, please do. I feel better than I have in years, no longer get short of breath and I don’t smell like ass any longer. If you want to smoke, your choice, but I guarantee that you will feel like a different person if you get that monkey of your back [/end hijack]
Yep. Same story here.
I also know a lot of people like that. All of my sisters went from smoking daily to smoking occasionally. I can’t do that. I quit smoking at 18 after about 9 years of smoking (yeah, you heard that right) and I can’t have another one without being sure that I will be hooked again.
But that’s just me. And you. And others like us. My argument with my friend, (let’s call him Stan) is that he doesn’t believe there are people who are not like you and me when it comes to alcohol.
I blame AA for his attitudes about it, but he hates that because he is anti-AA. I’m trying to convince Stan that he may be anti AA, but his view that an alcoholic can never go back to drinking moderately is probably influenced by AA’s definitions and influence on our society’s ideas about recovery.
This is how I framed the argument:
“I think that if you take a random sample of alcoholics and make two groups…the ones that choose to never have another drink and those who choose to drink moderately from now on, at the end of 5 years, you will see that both groups probably have similar success rates”
He howled with laughter and said, “You are just being silly and I can’t even take you seriously”
I realize he may be right, but man, I would love to surprise him and show him he’s wrong.
Neither him nor I are alcoholics, so we realize we are talking about something we can’t reference first hand. We will need numbers to back us up. When I tried to find numbers to support myself, I didn’t do so well.
He has an advantage that he knows a lot of recovering alcoholics but I told him they are probably influenced by AA’s propaganda, so of course they will say to him that moderate drinking will never work for an alcoholic.
That’s my thought as well. I’ve seen friends and family go in and out of AA with little (in my experience, no) success. I’m not trying to slam the program. It may be that alcoholism is a near death sentence that modern medicine/science cannot cure.
But I think that telling an alcoholic (again, whatever that means) that he can never, ever, ever, ever touch another drink again is a daunting thing to come to grips with. If we could tell him, “Follow this program, and you will be able to drink reasonably without getting DUIs and divorces” then he would be much more receptive to that.
Whether that can be done is the question for this thread.
I wish there were some numbers or studies, too. If you apply the “ens non multiplicanda sunt” or whatever it is, you win the argument, in a kind of philosophical way. Since there is no evidence either way, I guess you win?
Wait, I knew ens couldn’t be plural. Try entia. I am an old man struggling to remember!
Brother, I am worried about you. My thought was, “4 drinks a day?? regularly?? You’d be altered every day, yuck.”
:eek:
Er, you might want some looking up on tolerance, tapu :). Four drinks is what a third of a pint bottle? That’s A drink for a lot of people, even those who usually abstain.
Oh, yes, tolerance. I can forget about that in really too many contexts! 
As re drinking, four ounces of spirits is a serious drunk for me, I’m not that big. But that never stopped me from drinking 8-10 a night during my party years. Tolerance was just the ability to drink beyond that, without giving it away earlier.
I spent many years in the state some here describe of constantly being at least a little bit high and/or drunk. When I finally Just Stopped, I was miserable. How could I enjoy anything again? Hiking, driving, sight-seeing…? It took a good year before I realized that not drinking or being high is the natural way. That’s a hard thing for a constant user to grasp. (Physically or mentally.)
Back OT… it was a helluva lot easier for me to measure 0 drinks/drugs than to measure “some moderate amt of drinks/drugs.” Once 0 was the baseline, it hardly has occurred to me to do a drink or drug just because I’m going, say, camping.
Wow. I just posted in another thread that a couple sips of alcohol is no big deal for driving, and you just made me realize that I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about! Now I have to slink back to that thread and own up.
I figured a glass of wine was what most people could handle with, say, dinner. Not something to get drunk off. I understand smaller people can’t handle as much alcohol as larger people.
Are you calling me fat, nzinga? wait, I totally get buzzzzy after a pint…I mean some of a pint of whiskey too I was thinking of…other kids… 
???
Ah, we’re talking about different amounts, I now see. When I’m saying four ounces will wipe me out, I mean 4 shots of hard liquor (say, Scotch, if we’re ordering). You two are talking about 4 ounces of wine or beer?
We are talking ‘units’.
Simple Linctus was speaking of *units *of alcohol. You responded to that post, so we thought we were all on the same page.