What's wrong with being an alcoholic?

The BBQ Pit
1

Okay, that title is a little facetious. But not entirely.

I just want to hear what people have to say about this question. That said, I’m pretty sure that tempers run high on this issue, so I’m starting it in the Pit rather than GD or IMHO.

The inspiration for this thread was in another thread where somebody mentioned in passing that they had blacked out from drinking a couple of times. Several people chimed in saying that this was a big danger sign, that the poster should stop drinking immediately, etc. That conversation didn’t get particularly, heated, nor did it tick me off so that I felt I had to go start a Pit thread because I was just SO indignant. But it did get me thinking…

I’ll get to the point. Why is being a drunk so much worse (if it is) than being something equally dangerous?

I know someone who almost died skateboarding. My cousin has almost died and was seriously, permanently injured due to his love of extreme adventure tourism. I know another guy who put himself in the hospital for 6 months in a snowboarding accident.

Now, if I came on this board and told you that I’d gotten so drunk I fell down the stairs and broke my leg, or that I’d drunk a whole bottle of vodka and went to the hospital with alcohol poisoning, I think a lot of people would say “Wow, that guy’s got a real problem; he should get himself into treatment pronto.” (Incidentally, I haven’t ever done either of those things myself.)

But if I said I’d broken my leg skiing, or that gotten malaria rafting down the Congo, you’d say that those things were unfortunate, and maybe even that I should be more careful. But most people wouldn’t judge me the way they would for drink-related accidents of comparable seriousness.

So, why is drinking to excess worse than having any other dangerous hobby? I’m not saying it isn’t, I just want to know why the general consensus seems to be that it is. It seems like 50 years ago, the travails of drinking were seen as just part of doing business. Old movies are full of people who are hung over, or who spend a night in jail, or have other booze-related problems that I can’t think of right now, and it’s presented as relatively normal. A guy who blew all his money on booze was no better or worse than one who blew all his money on expensive cars, and one who acted like an ass from drinking was no worse than one who acted like an ass because he stressed out too much over his job.

One caveat: in the interests of making this a more interesting philosophical debate, I’m taking drunk driving off the table. We’ll assume that our test subject doesn’t have a car and doesn’t drive.

So: Is someone whose drinking causes him injury or inconvenience more to be censured than someone who has a hobby that causes him a comparable amount of injury and inconvenience, but who doesn’t drink? And if so, why?

2

Well, for one thing, alcoholics are usually very self-centered, often pathologically so. And emotionally unstable. And unreliable. And habitual liars. And spendthrifts. In short, not someone who’s a barrel of laughs to live with. I mean, physically live with, not just party with.

3

Well, I’m perfectly willing to accept that no one likes an alkie who’s also a dick. But I’m not convinced that I’d like an self-centered, unstable, unreliable liar even if they never touched anything stronger than barley water.

I think there’s more to it-- for example, people often worry about the excessive drinking of people they actually like (that was at least nominally the case in the example I cited above).

4

If the alcoholic doesn’t drive and has no one who depends upon him/her, then I guess nothing is wrong with it.

But we don’t live in a vacuum. If you are even remotely part of society, you have responsibilities to your fellow citizens (not to mention your family, friends and loved ones) to not be a slobbering idiot.

If one is a drunk, then they are taking themselves away from everyone in their lives, from their jobs to their family to acquaintances. They behave idiotically, erratically and unreliably.

Some turn into angry people, some are sloppy sappy drunks, others withdraw into some odd frozen silence. The behaviour of a drunk subtracts from the lives of others around him. It isn’t cute, or endearing or interesting to others when you are yelling at the top of your lungs some obscene joke that really is only funny to you, and only because you’re so blasted you can’t stand up straight.

Drunks REEK. The smell just seeps out of their pores as well as their breath. The brain cells die off at a very high rate and over time, the drunk just gets dumber and dumber and more of a burden to society, his family and most of all himself.

5

Becaue it’s not just a dangerous hobby. It’s not just getting drunk and falling down and breaking your leg.

If you’re actually talking about being an alcoholic, it’s about spending a lot of time not in a fit state to deal with life. Or other peoople. Either because you’re drunk or you’re hung over. It often means not being in a fit state to do your job. It means being emotionally …I can’t think of a good word…I mean where you never become an adult becuase you let alcohol take care of the difficult things you should have to deal with straight.

It mean, as it is not socially acceptable in many cases, lying to people. People you may love. And even if you don’t lie there’s a gap between the drunk and the sober. it seperates you from people.

It also means not being in the hospital for a month because you broke your leg…but eventuqally having your whole body break down and not being able to function.

And if it comes to that it might also mean getting someone’s liver that could have gone to someone who’s wounds we not self inflicted.

Thats allI got so far…I could go on.

6

I know that is the popular image of the alcoholic, but it’s not true in all or, in my experience most, cases.

I’ve seen reputable sources that stated that a majority, IIRC something like 75%, of the leaders of industry worldwide were functional alcoholics up to the 1960s, and that this continued in the USSR until the 1980s. That is contrary to your view that alcoholics are inevitably smelly, obnoxious and get stupid with age.

Certainly if you look at some of the more famous known alcoholics of the 20th century like Churchill or Kruschev it’s hard to find any overlap with the picture you paint. Usually we find intelligent, respected men whose mental capacities seemed to increase into extreme old age. People who never fell over, didn’t yell any more than anyone else in their positions and so forth.

The idea that an alcoholic is the same as a drunk is a fairly recent view of alcoholics. And in fact many long-term alcoholics are so tolerant of alcohol that they find it hard to get drunk.

Of course many other alcoholics do have the problems you describe. But that is not inevitable. Just like the OP says, it’s personal thing. Just as all surfers aren’t lazy hippy types with long hair all alcoholics are aren’t smelly or even drunks. Those are just stereotypes. And as the OP says, you don’t need alcohol to be a smelly obnoxious prick.

7

The term “alcoholic”, to me, means someone who has let alcohol control their lives. Not someone who goes out for a few drinks on the weekend, and perhaps even got rowdy once in a while and got their ass thrown in jail for the night.

An alcoholic is someone who drinks; morning, noon, and night, for whatever reason. Someone who is constantly drunk is of no use to friends or family. They can’t drive; if they need to go somewhere, they must rely on favours from friends and family. They become dependent. Money goes toward alcohol when it could better be served elsewhere. They smell bad. It is an inconvenience to anyone living with the alcoholic. No one wants to live with an alcoholic, mean drunk or not. They are sloppy, lazy, unreliable, and often in a foul mood. That’s what addiction does - you can’t feel very good until you get your next fix.

So, say the alcoholic lives alone. That’s fine, too. I hope they live in their own house, because the alcoholic downstairs in my apartment building is a gigantic nuisance to the rest of us who live here - banging loudly on windows in the middle of the night, talking too loud and not realising it, puking on the front steps every single morning… blech. Anyway, so if you lived in your own house all alone, to get to your job, you need a ride. Amazing if you could keep a job for very long; employers tend to frown upon people stumbling into work drunk, as alcoholics often do. Even the nicest ones. It starts small, like any addiction - just a nip before heading into work, a little liquid courage for that interview, etc.

Eventually, true alcoholics often become a burden on society if they don’t seek help. The bills go unpaid, since alcohol is the number one priority, they wind up homeless, on the streets, begging for change to buy a cheap bottle of wine.

All of the above, I have no cites for, and it’s just my experiences in dealing with true alcoholics. One of many examples is my mother’s father. His drinking got so bad, and was so hard on the entire family, that we not only stopped trying to save him, we eventually disowned him. I’ve never had a grandfather; but if that’s not sad enough, my mother never had a father. She grew up leaning with her back against the front door each night, with only a butterknife in her hand and a wedge under the door, protecting her younger siblings from her father’s drunken, rowdy friends, and often, from her father himself. He wasn’t always a mean drunk (but he could be, if the wind blew right), but even at his most cheerful, he would drop the baby, or treat him like a ragdoll. My mother still has nightmares today, over thirty years later.

Naturally, my opinion is heavily biased. FTR, I drink occasionally, (hell, I was drinking wine before this post) and I enjoy it very much. Sometimes, I even get drunk. But I am not an alcoholic, and I hope never to become one.

I’m open to hearing stories of successful alcoholics. I am quite ignorant of their existence, I admit.

8

Let me start out by saying that I don’t totally agree with anyone who says drinking to excess makes you an alcoholic. In my young, foolish Air Force days in Korea I used to drink enough to black out occasionally. Even when I didn’t drink enough to black out, I’d still partied it up pretty good.

So what?

As I got older, my drinking naturally tapered down. Now I drink maybe 2 or 3 times a month and rarely get more than a nice buzz going. So while blacking out is a danger sign, it doesn’t automatically make you an alcoholic.

Now, as to actual alcoholics. If you live alone and can get by, then I say it’s really no one else’s business. Living with others is a whole different thing, though. Often, living with an alcoholic is pure hell. I think you’d be hard pressed to find many who lived with an alcoholic and enjoyed it.

9

I missed this as I was writing my post.

This intrigues me. I know very little about these fellows, and I’d like to go read about them. I have to admit, if you’ve got it under your control… were they alcoholics? Really and truly? Or did they just really enjoy the drink… er, somewhat often?

I wonder where the line is drawn…

10

Well, I never liked you either. :stuck_out_tongue:
Sober 10 years, but I wasn’t pathologically all of those things; actually I was tremendously reliable and honest. Well, in regards to business and everything else I was doing at the time.
Just not about alcohol use. Ten years sober this month, though.
Many alcoholics - and I’m not talking heavy partiers, but true alcoholics - can and do maintain a high level of competence and integrity in their lives, and keep the drinking activity fairly seperate from their other responsibilities. An accomplished alky doesn’t get hangovers, even.
Speaking from experience, alcoholism runs deep through my family. I’m not making excuses for it though, ultimately it’s a really destructive force, though it might take many years for the damage to show. It killed my grandfather and my father, isn’t doing my brother much good, and I was going down the same path.

Yup. What he said.
I think the difference is, the proximate cause of a skateboarding accident is…skateboarding. Accidents are a reasonable risk in activities like that.
A skateboarding accident when drunk is due to being drunk. And, if the drinking is chronic, it’s a pattern that will result in all kinds of boneheaded “accidents” some of which may well involve other people who have a reasonable expectation that most people sharing the skateboard park - or the slopes, or the roads - are sober, not operating with seriously impaired judgement due to being shitfaced.

11

Alcoholism ruins more than one persons life. My mother drinks anything she can get her hands on. My father* has no idea what is in your daily household products. He didn’t quite catch on why my mother had started using mouthwash for weeks, nor why she started cooking with a lot of vanilla. She drinks anything. Methylated spirits, the works.

She also has 5 children. It’s safe to say she ruined 4 lives, and only one of them is her own.
*Who has also restricted her alcohol intake over the years so now she is down to 1-2 cans/day

12

Okay; I think we’ve established that someone who drinks a fifth a day, shows up for work drunk, can’t maintain relationships, and throws feces at everyone who passes by is not fun for themselves or anyone else. (By this definition, of course, your Churchills and Ted Kennedys and so on aren’t alcoholics.)

I guess what I was really talking about is this idea that if alcohol negatively impacts your life at all, you’re an alcoholic who shouldn’t drink. If someone drinks to extent that it causes them even occasional problems, should they quit? A lot of folks say yes. I say I’m not so sure.

I think we can agree that anything that totally ruins your life should be stopped. But what about somebody who blacks out, say, 4 times a year? Or sleeps with someone that they regret twice a year? (I’m assuming a subject who is single and on the market dating-wise.) Or shows up hung over to work once a month?

Such a person’s drinking is doing some damage, but not that much-- not necessarily any more than other bad habits. I’ve missed work because I couldn’t put a novel down, stayed up all night, and overslept. Should I quit reading?

I guess what I’m getting at is this: can one accept some problems, provided they’re not unmanageable, from booze, or should we take a zero-tolerance policy, because after all, a substance shouldn’t control even part of a person’s life?

13

Or more specifically, should the news that someone has blacked out or got a DUI 2 years ago prompt calls for an intervention?

14

Well, the issue wasn’t so much drinking as blacking out. And, I think, it’s a fairly rational viewpoint to say that if you’re using a substance, any substance, that reduces or removes your judgement while making you unable to remember what happened, then it’s not a great thing.

15

Here’s one reason:

People with whom you’ve not spoken to in years do not like to be called on the phone at three in the morning when you’ve been listening to old LPs that suddenly remind you of said person.

They really don’t like that. Usually their spouses don’t like it either.

“Hey, dude, remember when we went out 20 years ago and danced to “babe” by Styx? Well I just heard that song and had to share it with you. Oh, you’re sleeping…and now your wife is awake and pissed at you…so, wanna come over and party?”

16

My ex alcoholic was a fun leech who sucked all the fun out of life.

I got tired of babysitting his sorry self and couldn’t relax around him knowing I was going to have to pick up all the slack in life. At parties or other fun events, I couldn’t count on him to not get too snockered to be able to get us home safely and the following day stunk because he would frequently be too polluted to handle the day-to-day requirements of life such as getting to work (The Monday Morning Flu) or handling simple jobs like getting the laundry done. I often had to be ‘quiet’ because he would be ‘sick’. I got seriously tired of taking care of everything all the time and tip toeing around his headaches and stomach upsets.

To make up for his bad behaviour, he would often give me gifts- of alcohol.

Not to say he didn’t have good qualities- he was very funny and very handy with home and car repairs… when it didn’t interefere with his alcohol requirements.

17

I once heard alcoholism described as “needing to drink to feel normal.”
And that just isn’t normal. You can rationalize all you want (generic you here), but if you need a drink for your nerves, to feel good, to get the party going more quickly, to have that serious talk, to get through the job interview etc–it doesn’t really matter how competent you are–you are dependent, if not addicted to alcohol. Sooner or later the spiralling down will occur till bottom is reached.
In my life, I have known a few wonderful people who were alcoholics. Most alcoholics I have known have been narcissistic, immature, self-centered, insecure asses. My MIL is a dry drunk–she tortured her family and then me and then my kids for years. Now she’s sober, but that’s about it. Do you think there is alot of affection for this woman? Not from me or my kids. Her kids, maybe–but funny how my husband never calls her etc. People like to say that love is unconditional–but not when there’s an addiction in the picture.

18

Right, same if you said (like my brother did once) “Dad, when you told me not to mix drinks, you sure were right… oh GOD this hurts”. He’s never gotten anywhere near that drunk again.

And if you went and broke your arm skiing a black slope on your second-ever day of skiing and then went and sued the ski resort, I’d 1) file you under “moron” and 2) tell you to get an instructor next time you want to learn a new sport.

My cousin is a mountaineer. It isn’t just his job, it’s the center of his life. When he isn’t climbing some mountain in some foreign place, he’s back home… climbing the local mountains for practice. He’ll come back home after 6 months and not do any housework because, hey, he has to go practice. Does it sound self-centered? Yep. Guess who isn’t living with the wife any more? Yep.

19

My brother is an alcoholic. He lies constantly about everything in his life. He steals if he has to to get drunk. He’s had over 100 jobs, but is usually unemployed. He leeches off my mother for everything in his life. He’s been arrested for drunk driving three times. I really will not be surprised if he kills someone either driving or out of anger.

My grandmother did die from drinking. I found her body next to a vodka bottle that fell from her hand and a toilet full of vomit. My mother had to grow up under the care of that woman.

20

My understanding is that the modern medical definition of “addiction” involves facing signficant consequences and being unable to stop in spite of them. By that definition, it’s hard to see where Churchill was an alcoholic - did he experience health problems because of his drinking? He seems to have remained pretty functional from what I know about him.

Which may mean that the AA party line defines some things as “alcoholism” that don’t meet the standard definition of the term.