A guy asked me one time what a cure for my drinking might look like. I looked him right in the eye and I told him what I wanted in the way of a cure was to drink until I was blind drunk as often as I wanted to. Get just as obnoxious and insufferable as I wanted to get, and still have people love me. Oh yea, and not go to jail either.
Every year or so a new magic bullet is discovered. One would think that with all the wonder cures that have shown up that guarantee a cure for alcoholism that it would be hard to find a wet drunk anywhere. Here, just eat this pill, or change to this diet, or use this or that mental trick to learn to drink like a normal person. One would thing that this problem of alcoholism would be a disease of the past. Remember back in the olden days when men and women actually died of alcoholism?
Now chantix has shown up as the newest entry in a long list of magic bullets. I am not sure how this drug is suppose to work, so I can’t comment on it’s effectiveness. But…
It joins a long line of drugs designed to fix us alcoholics. If I understand how Campral and another similar drug, naltrexone works, it kills the buzz. That may seem like a solution in the short term, but just like any other drug, it's effects wear off. What happens when the alcoholic no longer has that drug in his system? These drugs, antibuse, and all other systems of killing the enjoyment of intoxication do not address the underlying desire to get loaded. The obsession to drink that a true alcoholic suffers from. They haven't fixed anything. They haven't changed anything. The best they can do is put a bandage on a hemorrhaging wound. As part of a larger program, these drugs may be helpful, but the cure for my alcoholism didn't come in the form of a pill or shot.
What a hopeless alcoholic needs is to have that obsession removed. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, but if I don't take that first drink, I can't get drunk. And the real question is how do I stop desiring that first drink? That's the real trick.
Don't kid yourselves deckhand, this getting and staying sober business doesn't come to us without some effort on our parts. There is no painless, effortless, pill in a bottle that will make the change in this alcoholics life sufficient to keep me from picking up that first drink. And in picking up that first drink, starting that tragic chain of events all over again.
By the way, come October the 8th, it will have been 9 years since I have found it necessary to pick up that first drink.
On the road to the good stuff,
Richard
