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 naltrexone has shown up as the newest entry in a long list of magic bullets. If I understand how 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? That drug, 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.

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 trick.

Don't kid yourselves, this getting and staying sober 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 an alcoholics life sufficient to keep him from picking up that first drink. And in picking up that first drink, starting that tragic chain of events all over again.

On the road to the good stuff,
richard s.