Rant For The Week: Booze Is To Drugs Like Milk Is To Cookies

It comes down to this: no one was smoking crack in Akron, Ohio in 1935. If they were, the first Twelve Step program would not have been called Alcoholics Anonymous and seventy-seven years later you would not see "sober" people smoking weed between meetings.

Alcohol is a drug. Put it in your system and it alters your consciousness, impairs your body, and makes you think you're extremely interesting, a great dancer, an unbeatable fighter, and able to drive home even though your right eyelid won't open for some reason. Maybe you can't stop drinking it even though you desperately want to. But when you say you're an alcoholic, you can still think of marijuana as something outside of your alcoholism instead of inside of your addiction.

Alcoholics - drug addicts - are already people prone to self delusion and hypocrisy. When you tell them that alcohol is different from drugs, you are giving them an easy out. When you label their condition "alcoholism", you are giving them an external focus instead of forcing them to confront themselves. The problem is not the liquid in the bottle, it is the shit in their brains.

I don't believe that addiction is a disease. Bill Wilson and the other founders of AA called it a disease because that was the best explanation they could come up with at the time. They did not have access to brain scans and the other tools of modern neuroscience. When the people of ancient Sumeria saw a comet, they figured it was a message from the gods. When the people of 1935 saw a man take a shot of whiskey minutes after his doctor told him one more drink would kill him, they figured he had a disease. It was a logical assumption at the time. Today, it's no longer an accurate conclusion based on the given evidence.

In my opinion, addiction is self-programming run amok. We are self-programming beings. If we learn to deal with overwhelming emotions by shutting down our central nervous systems with a six pack (or two), then that will become our default behavior. Eventually, we will literally not be able to do otherwise. Until we learn a new program.

I believe this idea of being able to re-program the brain keeps the responsibility of recovery on the addicts, while also giving them active hope. Addiction as an incurable disease is a depressing premise. Addiction as a reversible set of programming is an open invitation to a new way of living. And it doesn't make me roll my eyes when I hear it the way I do when someone tells me "alcoholism is a disease just like cancer is a disease." Is that so? Then how come I don't see cancer patients driving their cars into telephone poles after they take their medicine?