Corking the Bottle

[First published on May 20] I have been told and read since I was knee-high to a bourbon barrel that alcoholism is a disease. That's still my opinion and I'm sticking to it. But a book I am currently reading,  Scripts People Live   by by Claude Steiner, contains a different view (page 233). I will save you the wordy reasoning, but he writes that "real" diseases require micro-organism changes to some organ. No such bodily alterations cause mental illnesses and no drugs cure them, leaving afflictions like addictions as un-diseases. He goes on to claim, "At present no drug has proven effective to cure depression, madness, or drug abuse ... since these tragic scripts are not the result of chemical or micro-organismic changes in the body but the result of the scripted interactions between people.... Thus, alcoholism is not an illness." Not so fast, Claude. The Big Book disagrees. So do  Staying Sober  authors Terrence T. Gorski and Merlene Miller (page...

I have been told and read since I was knee-high to a bourbon barrel that alcoholism is a disease. That's still my opinion and I'm sticking to it. But a book I am currently reading, Scripts People Live by Claude Steiner, contains a different view (page 233). I will save you the wordy reasoning, but he writes that "real" diseases require micro-organism changes to some organ. No such bodily alterations cause mental illnesses and no drugs cure them, leaving afflictions like addictions as un-diseases. He goes on to claim, "At present no drug has proven effective to cure depression, madness, or drug abuse ... since these tragic scripts are not the result of chemical or micro-organismic changes in the body but the result of the scripted interactions between people.... Thus, alcoholism is not an illness." Not so fast, Claude. The Big Book disagrees. So do Staying Sober authors Terrence T. Gorski and Merlene Miller (page 39-40): "Addiction is a physical ...