Don S

Allergy, genetics….
Excerpted from The Implications and Limitations of Genetic Models of Alcoholism and Other Addictions
Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 47:63-73, 1986
Also on www. peele .net
By Stanton Peele

• [In the 19th-century] temperance movement… alcoholism was viewed as a danger inherent in the consumption of alcohol--one that could befall any habitual imbiber.

• The modern definition of alcoholism, as embodied by A.A. (1939), instead claimed that the alcoholic was a person who from birth was destined to be unable to control his or her drinking. The mechanism posited for this perpetual inability was an inbred 'allergy' to alcohol, one which dictated that from a first single drink the alcoholic was set on an inexorable path to intoxication and to an eventual diseased state.
• This … was readily investigated empirically and prompted a number of laboratory studies of the "priming effect," i.e., the result of giving an alcoholic a dose of the drug. These studies found no basis for believing that alcoholics lost control of their drinking whenever they tasted alcohol.

• Laboratory studies … showed that alcoholic behavior could not be described in terms of an internal compulsion to drink, but rather that even alcoholics--while drinking--remained sensitive to environmental and cognitive inputs, realized the impact of reward and punishment, were aware of the presence of others around them and of their behavior, and drank to achieve a specific level of intoxication.

• Genetic theories make little sense out of the enormous differences in alcoholism rates between social groups--like the Irish and the Jews--at opposite ends of the continuum in incidence of alcoholism ….

• [An] inherited, diminished sensitivity to alcohol only constitutes a contributory step toward the development of alcoholism.

• Whatever the nature of the process of alcohol addiction, given that it cannot be explained solely by repeated high levels of alcohol consumption, the slow, gradual nature of the …[progression] is borne out by the natural history of alcoholism. Vaillant's (1983) study, which covered 40 years of subjects' lives, offered "no credence to the common belief that some individuals become alcoholics after the first drink. The progression from alcohol use to misuse takes years."

• [Y]oung problem drinkers typically outgrow signs of alcohol dependence…, often in only a few years ….College students who display marked signs of alcohol dependence only rarely show the same problems 20 years later….

• Vaillant … put the matter even more succinctly. He indicated that finding a biological marker for alcoholism "would be as unlikely as finding one for basketball playing" and likened the role of heredity in alcoholism to that in "coronary heart disease, which is not due to twisted genes or to a specific disease. There is a genetic contribution, and the rest of it is due to maladaptive life-style.”

• Vaillant's quote is entirely consistent with his and other data in the field, all of which support an incremental or complex, interactive view of the influence of inheritance on alcoholism. No findings from genetically-oriented research have disputed the significance of behavioral, psychodynamic, existential and social-group factors in all kinds of drinking problems, and results of laboratory and field research have repeatedly demonstrated the essential role of these factors in explaining the drinking of the alcoholic individual.