We have all heard that liars figure and figures lie, but when we started delving deeply into the data about women and alcoholism we found many figures that just didn't...well...figure!

   For example, when it comes to DUI's (or DWI's) the number of arrests never matches any data on the incidence of alcoholism among women as compared to men. The trends are certainly there;  in 1977 only 8% of DUI's were for women, and by 2007 that percentage had doubled to 15%.  But that still means that there are 85 DUI arrests for men for every 15 for women in a culture whose youngest generation (the ones proven to do most of the drinking) have a higher usage rate for alcohol among females than among males! We started digging to find out how this could happen.

   Here is what we found. The difference is not truly in the number of women who are stopped who could be arrested for DUI. The difference lies in factors involving the policeman making the decision about whether to arrest or not, and his personal biases!

   A study by the National Highway and Safety Administration (US DOT Report H5-801-230) shows clearly the real factors involved in Officer O'malley's decisions. Decisions like, does he put the cuffs on Grandma? How about that cute YUPPY on her way back from Happy Hour to her condo?

Here's the first quote from the DOT study.

   "The officer's personal use of alcohol is inversely related to his level of alcohol-related enforcement. Patrolmen who drink make significantly fewer arrests than those who do not, and those who drink frequently make significantly fewer arrests than those who use alcohol only occasionally."

 This says that all of us have a better chance of "skating" when stopped drunk if the officer himself is a drinker!

The study elaborates concerning women. It points out that most officers are male, and that they tend to decide not to arrest anybody who is less aggressive, also anybody who looks, acts, sounds, and smells like their wife, mother, grandmother, sister, or the girl next door!

Looking deeper into the stone, what is the most dangerous result of women not receiving the DUI's they clearly earn? It is this; dui's are red flags that alcoholism is a problem. Women, because they donnot receive them, are allowed to progress deeper into the disease of alcoholism before they show up on society's radar screen.

In future posts we will show the same denial among other professionals such as physicians, clergymen, judges and attorneys. When are we all going to stop denying and admit that our women are right now...in this generation...more often alcoholics and addicts than in any other gereration in the past? Put another way, do you really believe that the latest starlet with this problem is an exception?

 If you are a man living in denial about the alcoholism and/or addiction in a woman in your life, please get help. Call Al-Anon, a support group for family members of alcoholics at 1-888-4AL-ANON or visit www.al-anon.alateen.org right now!

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What, me addicted?

   Addictive behaviors work. They provide temporary relief for intense physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual agony. We co-dependents have our own favorite addictions.

   To most of us, the word addiction brings to mind images of down and out souls whose lives are lost to drugs and alcohol. But that group actually represents only a fraction of the population whose lives are hampered by addiction. If we must do the numbers, it is generally accepted that about 10% of the U.S. population is addicted to alcohol alone, throw in other substances, and you get to about 15%.

Please consider this startling figure, however.

   Beyond the 10%, for every individual addicted to alcohol alone, there are four others who are intimately close to that person who are addicted to them!

   Because of the sick payoffs from rescuing alcoholics (see addictive agents #2, #4, #7, #8, #9, #11, #14, #15, #16, and #17 listed below), and because an alcoholic cannot survive without being propped up by those four other people (some call them co-dependents, some call them co-alcoholics), alcohol being swallowed by only one person soon creates a sick system where everybody pays a monumental personal price. Everybody in this system has to live in a state of powerful denial. In other words, as I write this, I am describing over half of the U. S. population!

The following excellent definition and listing of addictive agents is taken from Serenity, A Companion for Twelve Step Recovery. 

"Addictive agents are those persons or things on which we form an excessive dependency."

    1. Alcohol or drugs

    2. Work, achievement, and success

    3. Money addictions, such as overspending, gambling, hoarding.

    4. Control addictions, especially if they surface in personal, family, and business relationships

    5. Food addictions

    6. Sexual addictions

    7. Approval dependency (the need to please people)

    8. Rescuing patterns toward other persons

    9. Dependency on toxic relationships (relationships that are damaging and hurtful).

   10. Physical illness (hypochondria)

   11. Exercise and physical conditioning

   12. Cosmetics, clothes, cosmetic surgery, trying to look good on the outside

   13. Academic pursuits and excessive intellectualizing

   14. Religiosity or religious legalism (preoccupation with the form and the rules and regulations of religion, rather than benefiting from the real spiritual message).

   15. General perfectionism

   16. Cleaning and avoiding contamination and other obsessive-compulsive symptoms.

   17. Organizing, structuring (the need to always have everything in its place).

   18. Materialism.

    How did you do? If you are a relatively healthy person, physically, emotionally, and mentally, you will list about eight of these. If you are a co-dependent, you might suffer from some or all of them!

If you read something here that gave you one of those life-changing awarenesses, PLEASE...go for help. It it readily available right near you in your community. Just call 1-888-4-AL-ANON to learn about finding a meeting, or visit www.al-anon.alateen.org

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his finger over the top of my head, and announced loudly "this man is a wimp." Everybody who was a little drunk laughed hysterically.

But the following story illustrates how really important my drinking with her was to my now x-alcoholic wife. 

 "After about eight weeks in the program, working with my sponsor, I was wondering if my own drinking was offering a ready excuse for Deb. I discussed this with Scotty, and he said that this may be true. He remarked "...Why not just quit drinking with her and see if she responds?"

I really believed that she would not even notice. For example, I had started the process of stopping smoking earlier, and she didn't even seem to notice for weeks, so I really didn't know whether my drinking with her would be that important. So that weekend, while I did the yard work, I just left off the cold beer.

We had a fight that weekend, but I wasn't sure that the issue was whether or not I was drinking with her. We fought constantly anyway.

But to my amazement, when I started to leave early on Monday morning for a week of work in another city, I found a gift waiting for me on the kitchen counter. There, with a little note were six sparkling green bottles of Heineken beer, my favorite. The note said something like "a surprise for you!" There was even a little heart at the bottom!

I left the beer there, and when I returned the following Friday night I walked into a stinging hornet's nest. She had left the beer and the note there for five days, had looked at it every day, and had built up a rage that exploded in a well rehearsed verbal blast at me the moment I walked in the front door. We fought all weekend over whether or not I would drink with her. I guess my drinking with her was an issue after all.

Ken P.

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together day and night. We were in the ER overnight, in the clinics seeing patients all day across the street from the hospital, and, of course, we had to make "rounds" every evening.      

       We were rounding one night with the resident said "...would you like to see our yellow man?"

We all crowded into this small patient room. The resident began droning in that "rounds tone" that he had learned from so many of his professors.

"This is the last stage of acute alcoholism."

I was shocked at the bright yellow color of the man's skin. He was the color of an egg yoke! His liver shutdown had caused the back-up of bile, bilirubin, and creatine in his blood. In the resident's words, "...creatinine is liquid fecal material. It is the total of all of the debris from his intestines and kidneys that has not been filtered through a functioning liver."

What I saw was the bloated belly, the NG tubes, IV lines, the academic detachment of the IM resident demonstrating the testicular atrophy, the elevated liver function values...SGOT, amylase (pancreas shutdown), the BUN, serum creatinine...all numbers, letters, tubes, putrid smells. After he showed us the amazingly enlarged breasts under the gown, he said;

  "...alcohol suppresses the naturally occurring male hormones that normally balance the female hormones. This results in an exaggeration of the female secondary sex characteristics. You wind up with a guy with testicales the size of grapes and breasts the size of melons"

So much for "real men drink."  There are so many lies associated with this disease of alcoholism. Some are institutionalized. Some are engaged in by the whole public. Some, such as "real men drink" are lethal.

If you know of a "real man" who is systematically emasculating himself with daily alcohol consumption, maybe AA can save him. Even if he won't gp fopr help, why not get help for YOURSELF in a 12-step program like Al-Anon?

Just call Al-Anon for a meeting in your own community at 1-888-4AL-ANON or check out their web site at www.al-anonalateen.org.

Ken P.

 

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, priest, lawyer,mother, bishop, butcher, Chief of police,secretary, boss, carpenter, artist, son, engineer, realtor, sister, brother, laundryman,mailman, golf pro,The First Lady, teacher, blue collar worker, nurse, The President,psychiatrist, daughter, dentist,high school student, sailor, grammar-school-student, cousin,college student, janitor,soldier, movie star, waitress, minister, ski instructor, truck driver...and everyone else.

The functional alcoholic DOES NOT NECESSARILY:

1. Get drunk every time he/she drinks

2. Drink a large amount

3. Have hangovers

4. Miss a lot of work

5. Drink during the day, week, or month

6.  Look bleary-eyed

7.  Have slurred speech

8.  Stagger

9.  Get unpleasant or belligerant with other people

10.  Drink in the morning

11.  Become physically abusive

12.  Crave a drink

13.  Show up late for work

14.  Have any kind of withdrawal symptoms

15.  Get a DWI

16.  Ever look drunk

17.  Have blackouts.

 

Tomorrow I will post a listing of what the functional alcoholic DOES!

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you, he or she would stop drinking to please you?

5. Do you blame the drinker's behavior on his or her companions?

6. Are plans frequently upset or canceled or meals delayed because of the drinker?

7. Do you make threats, such as, "If you don't stop drinking. I'll leave you?"

8. Do you secretly try to smell the drinker's breath?

9. Are you afraid to upset someone for fear it will set off a drinking bout?

10. Have you been hurt or embarrassed by a drinker's behavior?

11. Are holidays and gatherings spoiled because of drinking?

12. Have you considered calling the police for help in fear of abuse?

13. Do you search for hidden alcohol?

14. Do you ever ride in a car with a driver who has been drinking?

15. Have you refused social invitations out of fear of anxiety?

16. Do you feel like a failure because you can't control the drinking?

17. Do you think that if the drinker stopped drinking, your other problems would be solved?

18. Do you ever threaten to hurt yourself to scare the drinker?

19. Do you feel angry, confused, or depressed most of the time?

20. Do you feel there is no one who understands your problems?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then welcome...you are definitely eligible for Al-Anon! This very moment, pick up the phone and call Al-Anon to learn where there is a weekly meeting in your community. The number is 1-888-4Al-Anon. You may also visit their excellent web site at www.al-anon.alateen.org.

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a private party with 1,000 closest friends, drugs, and alcohol - then declare success and rehabilitation from addiction.  This is ludicrous and not the way in which real drug rehabs operate.  I have no doubt that the large majority of these celebrities going into drug rehab have no real interest in staying sober, and that kind of attitude won't bring about recovery in any treatment center.
But for those who believe the actions of the few represent the behaviors of all drug rehab centers, this is simply not true.  With the dedication to get and stay sober, most treatment centers work absolute magic in maintaining sobriety, keeping substances out of the center, and keeping order and structure.  Drug rehab is not a vacation and at the same time, it is not a prison. 
Good drug rehab centers employ means to make sobriety fun with a variety of activities and exercises.  Most drug rehabs are good treatment centers and no amount of money will provide special treatment to give means for relapse and inappropriate behavior.  No level of celebrity can override the rules and regulations of the rehab facility.  No one addict is any more entitled than another, just as no one human is more entitled than another.
It's a shame to me that drug rehabs are getting a bad rap because of  a couple who have bowed to celebrity and money over  the gift and blessing of sobriety and if it were up to me, I would have the licenses of these drug rehabs revoked.  People should not be in this industry unless the number one priority is always helping addicts to heal.
Reocvery is possible with devotion to sobriety and a treatment center who shares the same vision of healing. 

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