Understanding the Disease of Addiction Before “That” Drink

By Lisa Frederiksen |

Understanding the disease of addiction before “that” drink. Where am I coming from?

I was reading a recent post, “Repeat Drunk Driver Accused in MLB Player’s Death,” reporting on the tragic death of a young, promising baseball player and two others at the hands of a repeat DUI offender, and was taken by Lou C’s comment on the post. He questioned “how you stop the problem drinker / alcoholic from taking the first drink while allowing the ‘social drinker’ to drink responsibly?” Lou C went on to say,  “Once the alcohol touches the mouth of the problem drinker/ alcoholic, all the statistics, education, meetings, rehabs. charts, books, past problems, are no longer thought about.” He is absolutely right. We need to attack the problem ahead of “that” drink.

As I’m sure you’ve gathered if you’ve been following my blog, alcohol abusers get DUIs, as do alcoholics, as do social drinkers who binge now and then. There is much being done to fight this, but in my opinion,  two areas that can be most effective for the near future are:

  • 1) Helping people understand their drinking patterns. Most bar pours contain more than one standard drink, for example, so people may think they’ve only had a couple of drinks when they’ve actually had 4 or 5. NIAAA’s new site can help with this, http://www.rethinkingdrinking.niaaa.nih.gov/.
  • 2) Providing parents, educators and young people with science based education on addiction, the developing brain and the impact of substance use/abuse on the brain during ages 12 – 25. NIAAA reports half of all alcoholics are addicted by age 21 and two-thirds by age 25. It is clearly a young person’s problem/disease, but we don’t recognize this because so many who finally get treatment don’t do it until later in life. These two websites can help: www.hbo.com/addiction and http://www.drugfree.org/parent/. This post explains brain development, ages 12 and up.

With over half of American adults and one in four of it’s children living with or loving a person who abuses or is addicted to alcohol, much work is still necessary. Perhaps the one thing we can all do is learn more about the disease of addiction and the role of alcohol abuse in the development of the disease and then talk about it. There is a great deal we need to understand so that we might better help the alcoholic before “that” drink.



Lisa Frederiksen

Lisa Frederiksen

Author | Speaker | Consultant | Founder at BreakingTheCycles.com
Lisa Frederiksen is the author of hundreds of articles and 12 books, including her latest, "10th Anniversary Edition If You Loved Me, You'd Stop! What you really need to know when your loved one drinks too much,” and "Loved One In Treatment? Now What!” She is a national keynote speaker with over 30 years speaking experience, consultant and founder of BreakingTheCycles.com. Lisa has spent the last 19+ years studying and simplifying breakthrough research on the brain, substance use and other mental health disorders, secondhand drinking, toxic stress, trauma/ACEs and related topics.
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Posted in Addiction | Substance Use Disorders | Treatment, Prevention | Intervention, Underage Drinking | Drug Use Prevention and tagged , , ,

2 Comments

  1. Mike on April 17, 2009 at 12:30 pm

    Thanks for the post.
    You know, I never really thought about the bar pour part. So true. Sometimes you just need to be told. Of course not all bars are that way, as you said, but I remember back when i drank…I ‘loved’ bartenders who poured more. But I paid the price the next day

    Reply
  2. LisaF on April 17, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    Thanks for your comment. I know what you mean about appreciating the bartenders who poured more… had those same experiences myself “back in the day.”

    Reply

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