In order to develop new medications for alcoholism, researchers need to understand how alcohol acts on the brain's reward system

These days most of us are willing to believe that drug addiction—including alcoholism—is a disease. Still, we harbor a sneaking suspicion that it’s really a disease of the weak-willed, the spiritually unfit, or people who are not quite like us. The comedian Mitch Hedberg understood this when he riffed: Alcoholism is a disease, but it’s the only one you can get yelled at for having.   “Goddamn it, Otto, you’re an alcoholic!”   “Goddamn it, Otto, you have lupus!”   One of those two doesn’t sound right.   Whatever our prejudices, the truth is, given the right circumstances (which can include factors...

Why do people, who have been sober for years, behave inappropriately with alarming regularity? Recently, I was asked this question in group therapy(the exact words have been edited as they were not fit to print). The person who posed the question felt she had been misled. She believed that, even after decades of recovery, some people were “still messed up and acting out their issues.”   Similarly, a reader who commented on my post, “What Recovering Alcoholics Can Teach Us About Happiness,” discussed her negative experience in AA. She described some longtime members as “seething cauldrons of...

Previous research regarding the association between alcohol consumption and dementia or cognitive impairment in later life suggests that mild to moderate alcohol consumption might be protective of dementia. However, most of the research has been conducted on subjects already rather elderly at the start of the follow-up. A new study published in the December issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease addresses this problem with a follow-up of more than two decades. The study, conducted at the University of Turku, University of Helsinki and National Institute for Health and Welfare in Finland based on subjects from the Finnish Twin...

Question: What do they mean when after being sober for years, if you start drinking again, your drinking will take off as though you haven’t been dry at all? In fact some say that it is worse, like if you were drinking all those dry years too. I am not planning to do this but a couple of members in my AA group described this, and I just wanted to check it out. I also wonder if you could explain why this happens? Answer: Your friends represent the profound wisdom of AA. Over the years and with thousands and thousand of years in recovery, it has been observed that when the occasional person who, after many years of abstinence from alcohol,...