I fully support the disease model. In my rehab we watched a film about addiction that said it was a 3 factoral model, biological, enviornmental, and access to substance. And on the first 2 you could score low, med, or high. The combination of those two determined how much substance you would need before crossing the line into addiction.

In my case I have a high genetic risk, alcoholism runs rampant through my family, and a high environmental risk. Alcohol was freely available to me in my home, and my father modeled a work hard, party hard lifestyle so I grew up thinking that heavy drinking was normal and how you handled bad stuff, and I had plenty of bad stuff growing up. So it took relatively little time, and exposure before my drinking was problematic. If I had had a different drug available to me, I suspect I could have become addicted to that instead.

Plus there are all sorts of studies now showing that there are brain differences between alcoholics and non alcoholics. We are more impulsive and different brain areas get stimulated when we see visual cues for alcohol.

So yeah I am on the disease side of things, but where I have the choice is in managing the disease. I can either choose to pick up or not, but once I have picked up all bets are off.

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