Expert: Joseph Lee O. - 1/6/2007

Question
I am doing a project in biology about how alcohol effects the brain and body. I would really appretiate it if you could answer a few questions I feel would be helpful to include in my project.
Is alcoholism just a mental problem or does your body really ask for alcohol once someone is really addicted?
If so what are the curements?
How much consumption of alcohol does it take to become an alcoholic?
What does it take to recover from an addcition to alcohol?
Thank you

Answer
Greetings to you, Patricia!

Thank you so much for writing, and I do believe I can offer some helpful insight and point you toward some useful information.

First, the matter of the subject of your letter: curing alcoholism.

Medically, there is no cure for or removal of the true alcoholic’s inability to control how much he or she drinks after even just one or two drinks.  If you do a web search for “Virginia Davis” and “THQ” or “THIQ”, you should be able to find some of her research and discoveries along that line.  From one article I happen to have on file, here is a glimpse of that:

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Dr. Virginia Davis was in the midst of a cancer research project in San Antonio, Texas. In her work, Dr. Davis studied brains from the cadavers of chronic alcoholics [note: she had initially wrongly concluded they had been heroin addicts] who had died on Skid Row. She ultimately confirmed the presence of large quantities of an addictive alkaloid, tetrahydroisoquinoline (THQ or THIQ), in the brains of the alcoholic cadavers. Through additional study, Dr. Davis discovered the connection between the alcoholic’s increased levels of acetaldehyde, the presence of THQ in the brains of chronic alcoholics, and the binding sites in the brain, elsewhere noted by Drs. Pert and Snyder.

Put simply, when a non-alcoholic ingests alcohol, it is absorbed through the lining of the stomach into the bloodstream. In the liver, two biochemical reactions occur by which the alcohol is effectively degenerated and eliminated from the body. In the first, the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase breaks down the alcohol into acetone and the toxic chemical known as acetaldehyde. The acetone is excreted from the body. In the second biochemical reaction, the enzyme acidaldehyde dehydrogenase breaks down and eliminates the acetaldehyde.

In the alcoholic, however, this process operates differently with devastating effects. In the initial biochemical reaction, the alcoholic’s liver produces acetaldehyde at an accelerated rate, so much so that the effect is that the liver is bombarded with twice the amount it is capable of immediately processing. This results from an insufficient supply of the enzyme acidaldehyde dehydrogenase being present to immediately break down and eliminate all of the acetaldehyde from the body. The excess acetaldehyde is dumped into the bloodstream, and after traveling to the brain is there condensed with dopamine into THQ [thereby triggering a physical craving for more alcohol, and beyond any mental control]. This process is repeated each time an alcoholic takes a drink. Slowly but surely, he or she builds up an ever-larger [and never diminishing] cache of THQ in the reward centers of the brain [that is again triggered and increased each and every time a next drink is ingested].
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Here is a link to a similar article:
http://www.barefootsworld.net/aaphenomcraving.html
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In the 1930s, William D. Silkworth was at least one doctor who had at least suspected something like that.  From his letter that is included in “The Doctor’s Opinion”, in “Alcoholics Anonymous”, the book:

“All [true alcoholics] have one symptom in common: they cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving.  This phenomenon, as we [doctors] have suggested, may be the manifestation of an allergy which differentiates these people, and sets them apart as a distinct entity.  It has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated.  The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence.
“This immediately precipitates us into a seething caldron of [medical, religious and psychological] debate.  Much has been written pro and con, but among physicians, the general opinion seems to be that most chronic alcoholics are doomed [to drink themselves to death unless something else first ends their drinking any alcohol at all].”

And in conjunction with the above, here are some comments from the alcoholics whose overall common experience is shared in “Alcoholics Anonymous”, the book:

Included in “The Doctor’s Opinion”: “The doctor's theory that we have an allergy to alcohol interests us.  As laymen, our opinion as to its soundness may, of course, mean little.  But as ex-problem drinkers, we can say that his explanation makes good sense.  It explains many things for which we cannot otherwise account [such as always again ending up drinking out of control no matter what or how much we had otherwise tried].”

From pages 30-31: “We are like men who have lost their legs; they never grow new ones.  Neither does there appear to be any kind of treatment which will make alcoholics of our kind like other men.  We have tried every imaginable remedy.  In some instances there has been brief recovery, followed always by a still worse relapse.  Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic.  Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn't done so yet.” (1939)

Moving along to your specific questions:

>> Is alcoholism just a mental problem or does your body really ask for alcohol once someone is really addicted?

You present a limiting either-or question, and I mention that because it is first crucial here to understand alcoholism as a two-fold or both-and condition:
1) a mental, emotional or psychological obsession for alcohol intoxication;
2) a brain-signaled (not mind-signaled) physical craving for the intoxicant.

I have been told the Chinese said this many centuries ago:

First the man takes a drink (mental), then the drink takes a drink (physical).

Again from “The Doctor’s Opinion”:

“[When sober, alcoholic men] and women drink essentially because they like the [mental or emotional] effect produced by alcohol.  The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious [to their general health and well-being], they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false [as to whether abstinence or drinking is the better of the two].  To them, their alcoholic [or mind-altered] life seems the only normal one.  They are restless, irritable and discontented [when sober], unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks - drinks which they see others taking with impunity [in that those others do not end up drinking beyond control].  After [the alcoholics] have succumbed to the [mental or emotional] desire again, as so many do, and the [physical] phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again.  This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change [or transformation of his or her psyche] there is very little hope of his recovery.”

Your question once again:

>> Is alcoholism just a mental problem or does your body really ask for alcohol once someone is really addicted?

The alcoholic has a certain kind of physical “digestive disorder” that results in his or her physical brain demanding (or one’s body “really asking for”) ever more alcohol after he or she begins drinking (and without his or her actual mind or conscious thought always being involved during one’s over-consumption), and it could be said that a certain mental or emotional disorder in one’s mind or thinking (rather than a mere brain dysfunction) took the first couple of drinks.

You have asked, “If so what are the curements?”

There is no such thing as “curing the physical allergy” and making an alcoholic into a normal or controlled drinker.  I have heard there are now medications to block actual intoxication, but then the alcoholic’s physical dilemma would still take him or her right along into “wet brain” or to his or her grave anyway.

As to the mental or emotion disorder or obsession that begins one’s drinking at all, the cure for that is the spiritual regeneration or transformation of one’s mind or psyche.  And, that can come about through one’s “taking the steps” as shared in “Alcoholics Anonymous”, the book.  The movie, however, or today’s AA, is comparatively and quite terribly impotent.

You have asked, “How much consumption of alcohol does it take to become an alcoholic?”

In my own case, I first drank relatively normally or moderately for about two years before I began finding myself staring at empties and wondering how or why I had begun having to sober up from ever-increasingly-bigger drunks.  However, I have heard other alcoholics share their experiences in going out-of-control and remaining that way from the very first time they ever drank.  So then, it seems to me that an alcoholic must consume whatever small or other amount it takes to set off the “THIQ Factor” and take them on into beyond-control drinking.  And if I might presume to re-word your question a bit, as from “become an alcoholic” to “reveal, expose or manifest one’s alcoholism”, I would propose alcoholics are born with their particular mental and physical predisposition later made evident unless they never drink any alcohol (or possibly only very little) at all.

You have asked, “What does it take to recover from an addiction to alcohol?”

Again, permanent recovery from chronic alcoholism can be experienced through spiritual transformation:

“... my friend sat before me, and he made the point-blank declaration that God had done for him what he could not do for himself.  His human will had failed.  Doctors had pronounced him incurable.  Society was about to lock him up.  Like myself, he had admitted complete defeat.  Then he had, in effect, been raised from the dead, suddenly taken from the scrap heap to a level of life better than the best he had ever known!
“Had this power originated in him?  Obviously it had not.  There had been no more power in him than there was in me at that minute; and this was none at all.
That floored me.  It began to look as though religious people were right after all.  Here was something at work in a human heart which had done the impossible.  My ideas about miracles were drastically revised right then.  Never mind the musty past; here sat a miracle directly across the kitchen table.  He shouted great tidings.
“I saw that my friend was much more than inwardly reorganized.  He was on a different footing.  His roots grasped a new soil.” (“Alcoholics Anonymous”, the book, pages 11-12)

“[One] man recounts that he tumbled out of bed to his knees.  In a few seconds he was overwhelmed by a conviction of the Presence of God.  It poured over and through him with the certainty and majesty of a great tide at flood.  The barriers he had built through the years were swept away.  He stood in the Presence of Infinite Power and Love.  He had stepped from bridge to shore.  For the first time, he lived in conscious companionship with his Creator.
“Thus was our friend's cornerstone fixed in place.  No later vicissitude has shaken it.  His alcoholic problem was taken away.  That very night, years ago, it disappeared.  Save for a few brief moments of temptation the thought of drink has never returned; and at such times a great revulsion has risen up in him.  Seemingly he could not drink even if he would.  God had restored his sanity.
“What is this but a miracle of healing?  Yet its elements are simple.  Circumstances made him willing to believe.  He humbly offered himself to his Maker - then he knew.
“Even so has God restored us all to our right minds.  To this man, the revelation was sudden.  Some of us grow into it more slowly.  But He has come to all who have honestly sought Him.
“When we drew near to Him He disclosed Himself to us!” (pages 56-57)

“And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone - even alcohol.  For by this time [Step Ten] sanity will have returned.  We will seldom be interested in liquor.  If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame.  We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically.  We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part.  It just comes!  That is the miracle of it.  We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation.  We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality - safe and protected.  We have not even sworn off.  Instead, the problem has been removed.  It does not exist for us.  We are neither cocky nor are we afraid.  That is our experience.  That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.” (pages 84-85)

Please know you are welcomed to write again at any time,

Joseph Lee O.

Email: leejosepho@hotmail.com