Drinking Too Much....Disease or Bad Behavior.....?

There are many people who consider alcoholism or drinking too much to be a disease. There are also many people who consider problem drinking to be caused by behavior and poor judgment.
There are also some folks who state that alcoholics are weak willed; sort of the morally bankrupt of our society. In fact, some folks would say it doesn’t hurt to have a few drunks around so we can see how we don’t want to be.
The AA model as well as many experts “in the field” consider people who drink in a manner that labels them alcoholic to be suffering from a disease. I guess before someone calls something a disease they should at least have a definition of what a disease is.
While I am surely not a doctor, nor do I claim to have medical training or medical knowledge, it would seem that a disease is something like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and so on. These are maladies that we can identify through tests. And, while I’m sure that we can show some causal relationship between, say smoking and lung cancer, in general we think that we have little control over having a disease. That is, we have little or no control over getting or having a disease or getting rid of it once we have it.
Well, we’re all entitled to think what we want, but I’m on the side of saying that alcoholism or problem drinking is behavior: Period. We are alcoholic because of our drinking behavior not because we have a disease that we have no control over that makes us drink.
Now, even if we say that alcoholism is a disease and that once we start drinking we have no control over it...it still starts with our picking up the bottle...and, that folks, is behavior.
One of the major problems of calling our problem drinking a disease is that it makes us not responsible...I mean, do you blame people who have cancer for getting it? No. Do you blame people who have heart disease if it doesn’t go away? Of course not.
Do we blame people who drink more than they should and their drinking causes them problems? Well, if you aren’t, you should. Period!
It hasn't been that long ago that we called people who drank too much, bums, drunks, dead beats, and so on. I’m not suggesting that we use these terms for everyone who has a problem with alcoholic but we have sort of made it more legitimate by referring to those behaviors as substance abuse problems. Hmm. Uncle Harry, who drinks a fifth a day and beats his wife isn’t a drunk...he’s, yep folks, he’s a substance abuser who’s suffering from a disease.
Before going further one thing should be clarified. There are people who suffer from organic diseases that for all practical purposes virtually makes it impossible for them to use sound judgment. That is, the way they are effected renders them incapable of using sound judgment or doing any type of problem solving. There are many people in our society who suffer from organic disease who just don’t have the capacity to understand the consequences of their behavior. That said, I will follow up that these people are in the minority. An extremely small minority. And, if you’re one who is in this minority you surely wouldn’t be reading this.
There is also a population of seriously mentally ill people who are also incapable of understanding the consequences of their behavior. And, their judgment is more particularly impaired when they stop their psychiatric medications or mix alcohol with the medications. Here again, if you’re seriously mentally ill, I doubt that you’d be reading this.
And, herein lies one of the problems with calling problem drinking a disease...these are just hapless victims of a terrible degenerative disease who basically have no control over their situation. Yeah, that’s what many people who call themselves alcoholics would have us believe; and, want us to believe.
Anyway, don’t get too hung up on the disease vs. behavior argument about drinking unless you’re trying to excuse yours or others boozing. All you have to do is assume responsibility for your behavior, drinking and otherwise, and you are headed in the right direction.