Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health by David Nutt

Author:David Nutt [Nutt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

Addiction: Have I Got an Alcohol Problem?

I drank to drown my sorrows, but the dammed things learned how to swim.

Frida Kahlo

it’s not your fault you want to drink. Alcohol is a powerful and addictive drug that’s not only legal but enmeshed in our every-day life. It’s almost impossible not to come across it as we grow up. And most social occasions and celebrations involve drink.

Being both relaxing and pleasant to take, alcohol encourages habitual use. Alcoholism is common, even (in fact especially) in the medical community . There’s a joke that goes: What’s the definition of an alcoholic? Someone who drinks more than their doctor!

Alcohol can make you feel like the person you want to be, too. So when people say, ‘Oh I adore the taste of my 1984 claret,’ I find it funny. Because I know that if you drank it for a few days and it didn’t get you feeling relaxed and cheerful, you wouldn’t be so keen on drinking it.

In the UK, government figures from 2016 estimate that 10.8 million adults are drinking at levels that pose some risk to their health. And 1.6 million adults may have some level of alcohol dependence.

Most people drink to relax rather than to get high and so don’t understand addiction. One of the reasons we as a society have to think carefully about addiction is that there’s a view, popular with conservative (small c) politicians, that addiction is fun and addicts enjoy getting drunk, and that they are weak. What I’ve seen, for most people who are alcoholics, is that they don’t want to do it; they have to do it, so much so that they can’t not do it.

There are lots of factors that add up to why people become addicted, which I’ll cover in this chapter, including genetics, lifestyle, life events – and the fact that it is an extremely powerful drug .

You could think about it like this: the majority of people who take heroin use it occasionally for fun. But 40 per cent of those who try it get addicted and then cannot not use it. For alcohol, this figure is around ten to 15 per cent.1

Countless addicts have told me they don’t want to drink, can’t stop and don’t know why . I’ve seen people ruin their health and their life.

One of the first times the strength of addiction began to be revealed to me was when I was aged 26. I’d finished my medical training in Britain and, after travelling through India and Myanmar, I ended up in Australia doing some postgraduate training, and working every weekend as a locum for a GP. Half of my cases were alcohol-related, whether it was people diving into empty swimming pools, self-harming or having fights.

One morning, around 9 a.m., a woman called me in to see her husband. When I arrived, he was staggering around, really drunk, very confused. He kept saying, ‘I can’t see’ and ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’ I ascertained that he’d been out drinking most of the night and had got home at 4 a.

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