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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Perry said a quote that he uses for his sobriety. Maybe it is an AA thing - I don't know. He said the alcoholic drinks the first drink, the addiction / disease drinks the the rest. It sounded like that gave him some feeling of control - that he can't control the disease but he can choose to not take the first sip.

[b]I have no addiction in my family and no addictive tendencies so while I have seen the destructiveness of the illness, it is a hard one to truly understand. [/b]I dated someone who didn't drink at all, had never tried it. He had many alcoholics in his family and had seen first hand the impact and he said the only way I 100% know that I will never have a drinking problem is to never take that first drink. [/quote]

I have some addictive tendencies in my family.  My father and my sister both had alcohol issues, but both had a "wake-up" call and were able to stop.  Both of them learned from the near fatal incidents that they had to stop completely and that any future drink, even one, could be the last action they ever did.  I say this only as a caveat.

I find the above PP's concept hard to understand by any reasonably intelligent person.  If you have no history of cancer in your family, do you find a family devastated by cancer hard to understand?  Heart disease?  Genetic disorders?  What I'm saying is that whether or not you have a history of some disease in your family, you can still understand that the disease happens to some people and some families a lot more than to others who may have no history or incident in their family.  Yet, people believe and understand that the disease can run in other families and can be devastating to those families.  [b]Why is substance addiction that much harder to understand than other diseases?[/b]

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Most alcoholics/drug users never want to take responsibility for their addiction. Always an excuse to drink. No one makes you go to the store and buy it.[/quote]

It's hard for me to understand because getting the disease of alcoholism is voluntary. If you never took that first drink, could you ever be an alcoholic?

You can't buy cancer, heart disease or genetic disorders from a store. 
You can say if you smoke, you can get lung cancer. But some people who have never smoked also get lung cancer.
The only way to be an alcoholic is to take that first drink. [/quote]

alcohol isn't some neutral thing sitting on the shelf like extra spicy mayo that you have no take on if you're not actively seeking it out.  billions are spent to make us believe that drinking is the way to be and have fun, to relax after a long week, to be sexy and flirty, to bond with your friends, to celebrate special occasions like an adult, to fit in.  no matter how smart we are, we almost all internalize those messages that are so ingrained in our culture / movies / music/ ads etc. So of course most people have a drink and most people are fine so there's a lot of reinforcing data that it is fine and fun and something you look forward to. its not at all the same as other food and drinks out there
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