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I understand the chemical dependency. But if you had a parent with a alcohol problem, as a kid, make a vow to never touch the stuff. Cocaine is additive and people have to have it but if you don’t touch it, you never become addicted. Ditto alcohol. Nobody who has never taken a drink is an alcoholic.

You dont at all sound like a real alcoholic. You think that cocaine addiction is the same as alcohol addiction. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions...but dude, you shouldn’t talk about something that you have no personal experience with especially alcohol addiction. And by personal I dont mean a brother or a parent or fillintheblank other person.

...if you had a parent with a alcohol problem, as a kid, make a vow to never touch the stuff.

What advice do you give the kid who grew up to be the only alcoholic in a Christian family? No one smoked, drank, and rarely cussed. Church every Sunday. One day the eight year old twin brother in the family was given about 3 cups of beer in the bottom of a 40oz bottle by a stranger riding a horse. The boy drinks half of it and is disgusted by the taste and hides it in a planter box. 10 minutes later the kid experiences what he now at 55 years old can only describe as an intense spiritual experience. The sun was brighter. The trees were greener. The sky was bluer. He has become free like a sort of angel and he doesnt know why. He even starts to run home in a feeling of almost ecstasy. At the start of the driveway he plants his foot and stops...and remembers theres still a little bit more of that disgusting liquid in that bottle. And he turns kind of slowly...nervously...and goes back to where he hid it...and drinks the rest of it.

After that experience....the kid only knows that there is some sort of genie in those bottles of liquid that only the grownups are allowed to drink. He has discovered their "secret". And his life goes on...no one the wiser...as he sneaks sips from the grownups glasses when family events are being celebrated.

I'll stop there.

I understand the chemical dependency. But if you had a parent with a alcohol problem, as a kid, make a vow to never touch the stuff. Cocaine is additive and people have to have it but if you don’t touch it, you never become addicted. Ditto alcohol. Nobody who has never taken a drink is an alcoholic.

I *SUSPECT* that a number of people who say they are born alcoholics maybe literally are.

Not necessarily genetically, although I suppose some have a predisposition to it, but I have often wondered if when a woman drinks while pregnant, if the baby isn't more susceptible at that stage and becomes an alcoholic in utero.

So maybe they are literally born an alcoholic and nobody ever knew, and they take that first drink as an adult and are sunk from the get go.