Controlled Drinking

For the past two decades, social psychologist Stanton Peele has questioned the necessity of abstinence for alcoholics, stating, in effect for Addiction and Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of conrol, the "myth" immediate relapse is not well supported by statistical research.

Bulling his way over hundreds of published scientific studies on the neurobiology of addiction, Peele continues to insist that the disease concept of alcoholism has no basis in modern science. Believing that the personal values of people to decide whether or not they become addicts, Peele has written that "no data of any kind of support to the idea that addiction is a characteristic of certain psychotropic substances and not others ".

"Those who have better things to do," Peele writes, "are protected against abuse."

Andrew Weil, a well-known drug authority and author of The Natural Mind, has also objected to the "grossly materialistic conceptions of addiction" offered by supporters of biochemically.

A biological perspective of addiction may be a way to give intractable addicts hope, researchers say. Peele, however, draw exactly the opposite conclusion, arguing that the disease model is telling addicts that there is no hope, they can not do anything about their incurable disease. "

Given all the qualifiers based on the biochemical theories that researchers have felt obliged to use first, it was galling in the extreme to have critics like Peele derision effort in its entirety - and The most amazing of all, bringing back the old bugaboo about alcohol controlled. Proponents of the theory hold that controlled drinking alcoholics can often return to the social, ethical consumption, without having to maintain total abstinence.

If an alcohol limit himself to two or three glasses a day, and he does it successfully for a period of time, this behavior looks from the outside as controlled drinking. Many alcoholics and addicts are able to accomplish this feat for varying durations. Indeed, AA members are familiar with this form of infringement of controlled drinking, and even have a name for it: the white-knuckle sobriety. Controlled drinking - also known as sobriety without abstinence - is certainly not unknown among alcoholics

But is it a practical response to
Alcoholism ?

Dr. Arnold Ludwig, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, disagrees. In his book, Understanding the alcoholic spirit, Ludwig wrote: "The authors contend that many can not return to normal drinking water fail to grasp an essential point: it is less frustrating for the preponderance of alcoholics avoid drinking altogether than just a normal drink companies, as only a martini, a glass of wine or a beer. "

For the most severe alcoholics, it is easier to abstain, rather than engage in controlled, responsible, non-drinking drunk.

The idea of controlled drinking (or consumption of controlled drugs) is the only hope almost every addict brings to his first meeting with the treatment. As a veteran AA said: "If it were possible for a majority of alcoholics to return to controlled drinking water, all alcoholics in AA have thought about it long ago."

Sometimes it seems that critics like Stanton Peele attempt to resurrect the moral vision of the past.