Uh, yeah probably. If I needed to run to the medicine cabinet every time I had a bad day, I’d wonder WTF was going on and ask my doctor if pehaps something different would be more apporpriate, 'cause something just ain’t right there. Just because it’s prescribed doesn’t mean that you can’t develop a very negative dependency on them.
The difference with a prescription (in theory) is that they are taken under a doctor’s supervision and (in theory) a doctor would change a course of treatment if it seemed that you may be abusing it or that you were developing a dependency (either physical or psychological). It’s supposed to be “controlled and monitored by a professional” while going to the pub and getting blotto is not. A doctor can change or put an end to your prescription. “Self-medicating” (with alcohol or anything else) is more prone to abuse.
The AA questions are meant as a general guideline to help you recognize patterns of behaviour that are known indicators.
If a guy gets dumped by his girlfriend and goes on a bender that’s one thing.
If he goes on a bender regularly, like every time he encounters run-of-the-mill stress in his life – like he missed the bus! oh, no! got a parking ticket! today I’m having a bad self-esteem day! – it’s a little different scenario.
I’m not sure why there’s a beef with the AA questions. An alcoholic will also VERY likely answer yes to more than one question on the list. The list is just supposed to provoke discussion. They are not definitive and are not really intended to be.
I am quite light and have very little alcohol tolerance. I can, without a second thought, drink two thirds of a glass of wine and leave the rest behind. The true alcoholics I have known – and I’ve had this discussion more than once – can’t understand how I could leave it behind. It’s wine, it’s there, it must be drunk, because once you start drinking, you don’t stop. I can’t comprehend that any more than they can comprehend my leaving it behind, because while I like the occasional drink, I do not like the effect, so I don’t drink enough to feel much. I once had two glasses of wine and swore I wouldn’t do that again, as I really didn’t like the disembodied feeling I got.
To me that very difference clarifies the difference between an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic. I don’t like the feeling, and I can stop. They drink (in the case of the people I know, drank) FOR the effect, and can’t (couldn’t) stop.
Having a glass or so of wine with dinner does not an alcoholic make. The school’s scare tactics, while perhaps well-meant, are frickin’ ridiculous. I wonder how many of the people who came up with this program experimented with drugs in their youth? I was shocked when I found out that even my dad had smoked pot recreationally on occasion in college. He was not exactly a pothead, nor had he gone on to hard drugs, because that is what everybody who smokes pot does, right? :rolleyes: There is a world of difference between pot and heroin. Duh. (Of course, I’m largely for legalization anyway, so I’m probably just pure Evil. Evil who has never done drugs at all, but Evil nonetheless.)
Once when I was 20 and visiting a friend in Ottawa I ended up at dinner with three active AAers (including said friend). I wasn’t going to get a drink because I thought it might be rude, but they said to go ahead, you’re legal! So I did. And I didn’t finish it, which left them entirely mystified.
I think you’re right to be concerned about this. In a couple of years, your kid is (hopefully) going to be in college, where he’s going to be getting precisely the opposite message on a pretty daily basis. Your kid is going to need a rational understanding of how dangerous drugs and alcohol really are, and SADD is not going to give it to him. They’re so wildly over-exagerating the dangers that, once he’s old enough to realize how much of the propaganda he was fed in high school turned out to be lies, he might end up ignoring all the warnings about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, even the valid ones, and end up at the other extreme.
I’m not a parent, so I’m hesitant to give any parenting advice, but I agree with the posters who said not to punish him for stealing sips of wine, or at least, not punishing him as severly as he seems to think he deserves. Maybe a week of no TV, and make it explicit that the punishment is more for “going behind dad’s back” and not for “underage drinking,” which seems to me to be the far worse infraction.
I might also have a word or two with his school about using scare tactics instead of teaching. That sort of approach is never a good one.
I know a major alcoholic and if you did that with him, when it came time to leave the restaurant, would reach across the table and finish off your glass for you. :eek:
Can someone address this? I think that Frank brings up a good point. I don’t think that most people consider a beer every 3 hours to be bingeing, let alone 2 beers in 3 hours.
Well yeah, I’d say that anyone who needs to get plastered because they got a hangnail has a serious problem, I just think that the way some of the questions are phrased as in the ‘Have you ever felt the need to drink to relax?’ type of question becomes a bit too broad.
In a way what I was commenting on was that certain types of chemical dependence seem to be not only taken as normal, but even encouraged, such as the case of the ‘I’m going to write you a prescription for Valium. Take one when you feel all stressed out.’ thing, yet other types which are chemicals with less side effects and may even be less frequent (unwind from the week with a few friends and a few drinks on Friday night) are generalized as ‘binge drinking’ or even ‘alcoholism’.
I also think that it’s kind of odd to consider two beers in a six hour period is a ‘binge’. That’s calling a two beer trip to the baseball game a binge.
I hate to think what they’d think of me…I’d probably refrain from commenting on my drinking habits. I drink once per month at maximum, but I have 6 or 7 units worth in the span of half an hour when I do…it had better be worth it for me to consume the foul tasting alcohol!
The feeling of being that drunk is quite good, but not worth the emotional hangover for me. Interestingly enough, I have never gotten a physical hangover, but when my body refuses to pump serotonin, even hair of the dog won’t get rid of the come-down. I shudder to think what Ecstacy users must experience :eek:
It’s like the “Has Your Teen Joined a Cult???” literature that asks broad questions like “Is your teen reclusive?” “Does he/she get upset when you invade his/her room?” Stuff that would put every teen in the “oh, my god, my kid has joined a cult!!!” category.
I think (and this is very subjective and only based on what I’ve seen), that a lot of AA and NA lit is geared to people who, really, already know they have a problem and that’s why they are looking at the material. It really is designed to encourage discussion.
I spent my first two week of university in a booze haze. Does that make me an alcoholic? Probably not (I barely touched alcohol for years after that fun period). Do I need and I mean really need alcohol when I’m upset? Nah. Can I walk away from a half filled glass? Yeah, sure. But my father really, really couldn’t. He needed alcohol and seemed to be hardwired to crave it.
He could recognize himself in the broad description they provided. It was a little over the top, sure, but not-so-deep-down he knew he had a problem. That’s how those dumb little pamphlets work. They encourage you to simply think a bit. Deep down you know if something isn’t quite right.
Non-alcoholics will go “Pfeh! Cite? Cite, please!” An alcoholic who is not in denial will go “Awww, crap! That looks like me.”
And FWIW, my father had (very likely) an undiagnosed mental illness. Alcoholism can “mask” other problems. People “self-medicate”, so substance abuse is high amoung the mentally ill – “I feel like shit, this makes me feel a bit less like shit”… So you are treated for alcoholism and the problem that led to the alcoholism may go undiagnosed unless you present really obviously.
He died of a smoking/alcoholism-related cancer. Poor dude. I don’t think anyone thought to look into anything else. Poor dude. With the right treatment, he couldn’ve managed a helluva lot better.
I used to routinely have three to five drinks before bed when I would travel on business. This was so I could get to sleep in a strange, often uncomfortable bed with a noisy heater in the room. (Lately I haven’t needed this, which is probably more a consequence of cutting all caffeine out of my diet.)
Aside from this behavior, my alcohol consumption is generally limited to a drink with a meal once in a rare while, and the occasional social drink. But according to the standards I’m seeing batted around the 3 to 5 drinks I would use every night over the course of a week makes me a problem drinker? Bah. I think not.
I know what it’s like to be a problem drinker. Shortly after I turned 21, I discovered how to use alcohol to “manage” my depression. I would generally be drunk by noon and stay drunk until midnight, unless I was going to be going out that day in which case I would stay sober because driving while drunk is a bloody dumb idea. (I’ve never drove while even vaguely drunk.) I did this basically every day for about three months. And yet, I’m not an alcoholic; not even close. Yeah, what I was doing was a problem, but it doesn’t make me an alcoholic.
Update: Yesterday evening I booted up the PC at home with my son, and we read through the links together that people had referenced here. Then we read this entire thread together. It was very helpful. He got to see that it’s possible to discuss the alchohol issue with rational, non-lurid language. He also got to read the opinions and ideas from all of you. I think he came away with a less hysterical approach to the issue, and started to see that there’s a difference between drinking somewhat, and drinking to the point of alchoholism.
He was interested to see that I was worried about him, about the SADD program at school, and about his request for extra punishment. I explained to him that yes, he did a bad thing, and it was serious, but it’s not as though he committed murder.
He was also impressed to read the response from congodwarf, and his experiences and reactions to undergoing the SADD program at his school.
So thank you everyone, you have all been very helpful.
Having been forced to attend AA twice a week for 8 weeks (marijuana arrest but my councilor didn’t want me to go to NA because, to quote, he thought I’d meet a nicer class of addicts in AA), I quickly learned the difference between a moderate social drinker and an alcoholic.
To lump them in the same class is to effectively trivialize the horror that a full-fledged alcoholic experiences
I remember one man explaining how he used to chug a 6 pack of beer before his shower and vomit blood becuase it allowed him to keep down the vodka that he drunk for breakfast.
That’s one of the things I find so ineffectual about programs like SADD-they muddy the definintion.
Glad things are going well.
I’m afraid I didn’t get those stats off the web, they’re the UK and Irish government recommended drinking limits, and the other stuff is from some old pharmacology lectures, and the MPS textbook of Medicine’s section on alcohol, from about 5 years ago.
I know the binge drinking definition is stupidly low, but it’s been shown that binges are worse for you than regular low alcohol intake.
I know a lot of male patients who drink 9 pints on a Faturday night (18 units) or 6 pints on a Friday and the same on a Saturday (24 units in total). Because they’re under the recommended levels, they consider theselves “light” or “occasional” drinkers, when actually they’re doing more harm than someone having 3 glasses of wine every day.
