Alcohol / Drug Addiction

Al-Anon Family Groups

Al-Anon Family Groups is a community resource providing support to anyone affected by a relative or friend's drinking. There are over 26,000 Al-Anon and Alateen groups meeting in 115 countries.

Al-Anon:

• Has only one requirement for membership -- each member has been affected by someone else's drinking.
• Is an anonymous fellowship of relatives and friends of alcoholics who meet anonymously to share their experience, strength and hope in order to solve their common problems; adult children of alcoholics, parents, partners, spouses, co-workers, etc., can al find help in Al-Anon.
• Is a separate fellowship from Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Al-Anon is based on the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions adapted from AA.
• Is nonprofessional, self-supporting, spiritually based, apolitical, welcomes all cultures and is available almost everywhere.  

Alateen:

• Is part of the Al-Anon Fellowship designed for the younger relatives and friends of alcoholics through age nineteen.
• Follows the same Twelve Steps, Twelve Traditions and principles as Al-Anon.
• Members conduct their own meetings with the guidance of an Al-Anon member sponsor. 

Alcoholics Anonymous UK has made a video for newcomers to A.A. You may see the video here.

©A1-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc. 1600 Corporate Landing Parkway, Virginia Beach, VA 23454-5617 Phone: (757) 563-1600 Fax: (757) 563-1655 e-mail: wso@al-anon.org "Fact Sheet For Professionals -- Information About Al-Anon & Alateen" (S-37)

For more information on Alanon or Alateen, please see their website at: http://www.al-anon.alateen.org/

Alcoholism does not only affect the addicted person, but also the family, friends, and colleagues that deal with them. Kevin Helliker recently wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal and has given us permission to post his article 'Stop Before You Start'. This article outlines the link between alcoholic parents and the high chance of their offspring becoming addicts themselves.

Stop Before You Start
By Kevin Helliker

For the children of alcoholics, the best advice may be the simplest: Don’t drink at all

When Dale Irwin was 10, his father left home and became a denizen of the streets, intent only on feeding his addiction to alcohol. Witnessing such slavery to booze made an impression on young Dale. "I vowed I would never become an alcoholic," he recalls.
But he became one anyway. "The only difference between us was that my father drank rotgut and I drank expensive scotch," says Mr. Irwin, a 58-year-old lawyer in Kansas City, Mo.

For three decades, public-health officials have been warning that alcoholism confers a powerful genetic predisposition. But those warnings have hardly kept the offspring of alcoholics from sinking into the same muck that trapped their parents. Knowledge of the danger, it turns out, isn’t sufficient to avoid it. “Try willing yourself not to get cancer.” Says Mr. Irwin, a recovering alcoholic who hasn’t touched a drop in 24 years.
Now, a growing number of addiction specialists are arguing that the children of alcoholics deserve something stronger than a warning. They say that these high-risk individuals should be advised to at least consider abstinence – before they even know whether they will fall prey to the same disease that befell their parents.

THE RISK FOR KIDS

The rationale is simple: Studies show that the biological offspring of an alcoholic parent run a one-in-three chance of developing the affliction, compared with a one-in-12 risk for the general population. What’s more, the culprit appears to be more genetic than environmental. Studies have shown that when the progeny of alcoholics are adopted as newborns and raised in nonalcoholic homes, their risk of becoming alcoholic is three to four times greater than average – the same as if they’d been reared by their biologically addicted parents.

“If you have a patient who by family history has a fourfold increase in risk for alcoholism, absolutely it makes sense to suggest that he abstain.” Says Marc Schuckit, a professor of psychiatry at the San Diego Veterans Affairs Hospital and editor of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol.

The primary virtue of a abstinence as a prevention strategy is that, like few other medical protocols, it is 100% effective. “You can’t get this disease if you choose not to drink or take drugs.” Says sis Wenger, president of the National Association for Children of Alcoholics, which in 2002 began including an abstinence message on its brochures for youth.

Another virtue of the abstinence strategy is that it costs nothing and is nonaggressive compared with protocols for other inherited conditions. A family history of heart disease for example, often leads to early screening for cholesterol, electrical abnormalities and coronary blockages. A genetic predisposition to colon cancer tends to initiate early colonoscopies. Some women with a serious genetic predisposition to breast cancer have even undergone prophylactic mastectomies.

Certainly, alcoholism is no less serious than those conditions. A killer of 85,000 Americans a year, alcoholism is the third most common cause of preventable death in America, behind smoking and obesity. And no other disease is more destructive to families.

MEMORIES OF PROHIBITION

Also, any mention of abstinence stirs memories of religious-driven campaigns, such as the movement that in 1920 ushered in Prohibition, the federal outlawing of liquor sales that spawned a booming business for organized crime. Prohibition still exists in some U.S. counties and on some American Indian reservations. And already, some critics profess to see religious and cultural – rather than scientific – forces behind such laws as the prohibition of liquor sales to people under age 21. “There is a significant neo-prohibitionist movement under way in this country.” warns an article on a Web site, funded in part by the Distilled Spirits Council of the E.S. called “Alcohol: Problems and Solutions.”

Advising the grown children of alcoholics to abstain altogether is “somewhat extreme” says the host of that Web site, David J. Hanson, a professor emeritus of sociology at State University of New York. “I see this admonition as driven not by science but by changing cultural views.” he adds.

COUNTERING THE CULTURE

But others say that a distorted societal view of the importance of drinking is to blame for many children of alcoholics never hearing any abstinence recommendation. “There’s a widespread and misguided assumption that drinking is necessary for social life and pleasure.” says psychiatrist Robert DuPont, an addiction specialist who served as first director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

To be sure, no research exists showing that the grown children of alcoholics would adhere to abstinence advice. In part because of the lack of such research, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism doesn’t suggest abstinence for adult children of alcoholics on its Web page entitled “A Family History of Alcoholism: Are You at Risk?”. Instead, the institute advises the adult children of alcoholics to drink moderately, defined as no more than one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men.
But the institute strongly urges underage Americans to abstain – despite evidence showing that 90% of them drink before age 21. And the agency’s own director of treatment and recovery research, psychiatrist Mark Willenbring says that as a clinician he suggests that the children of alcoholics consider abstinence. “If you can prevent even one case, it’s worthwhile.” he says.

Nobody grown us more determined to avoid alcoholism than the offspring of alcoholics. As children, they never know when an ordinary evening will evolve into a horror show, as booze turns a loving parent into a monster. Among these kids, vowing to avoid an alcoholic future is so common that the classic text on the phenomenon – a tome that has sold more than two million copies since 1982 – is called “It Will Never Happen to Me”.

Why it so often does happen is a mystery. No genetic tests can distinguish which offspring of alcoholics will develop the problem. Certainly, many people become alcoholic who have no family history. Even for those people who come from addicted families, “the risk is about 60% genetic and 40% environment,” says Dr. Schuckit. A genetic predisposition to alcohol typically isn’t fulfilled without environmental factors such as peer pressure or simple availability of alcohol. His research has offered one possible clue: The children of alcoholics appear to harbor a low response to alcohol, meaning that many of them must drink extraordinary amounts to feel much effect – a phenomenon that could lead to excessive consumption.

BUT DOES IT WORK?

Whether preaching moderation to an incipient alcoholic makes any difference is unclear. After all, moderation is the dream – or illusion – of nearly every heavy drinker. “I never met anyone who set out to become an alcoholic,” says Dr. Willenbring.
Certainly, Doreen Dorr didn’t. Four years ago, she was a housewife, raising two children in a five-bedroom home and trying to drink moderately. Today, the 30 year old daughter of a recovering alcoholic is divorced and residing under court order in a Chicago addiction-treatment center called Gateway Foundation. “More is my middle name,” says Ms. Dorr of her attempts to drink moderately. “Booze always led to more booze and then to drugs.”

Indisputably, abstinence represents a sure-fire remedy for the genetic vulnerability. When her son decided as an adolescent never to drink, the legacy of alcoholism that passed from both of her parents to Terry Irwin, a Kansas City woman who has been sober since 1980, didn’t extend to the third generation. Today, her son is a 38-year-old physician, husband and father. “His attitude from day one has been, ‘Why take a risk?’” says Mrs. Irwin.

Promoting abstinence as a strategy for the children of alcoholics could help diminish the perception of nondrinking as peculiar. The children of alcoholics tend to grow up in cultures in which nearly everybody drinks at least a little, and within those cultures little awareness exists of the cast numbers of American adults who don’t drink. According to a 2004 National Institutes of Health press release, more than 40% of Americans either don’t drink or consume fewer than 12 drinks a year.

To avoid addiction altogether, however, abstinence must extend beyond alcohol. A family history of alcoholism prompted young Carrie Schwartz never to drink. But as a 17-year-old, she began smoking marijuana, and within two years the suburban Pennsylvania woman entered treatment for a heroin addiction. “I viewed alcohol as the bad thing that ruined lives,” says Ms. Schwartz, 21, and clean now for three years. “But if addiction is in your family, you need to stay away from it all.”
 

This article is reprinted with permission. Originally published in the Wall Street Journal, October 21-22, 2006.