bovinePieBear

When I first read your post, I thought of this as the main point of your post. It's interesting to see how others have responded - isn't language a difficult tool?

Frankie Boyle is a Scottish comedian, and an openly tee-total alcoholic. He has a story of performing a gig where, during a break, a man from the audience offered to buy him a pint. He told the man thanks, but no thanks, because he was an alcoholic and didn't drink any more. The man thought for a moment, and finally said, "A lager shandy then?"

No matter how much at peace one feels with the concept of alcohol addiction for oneself, in everyday life it is not possible to avoid the poorly informed, negative, judgemental and condemning views of alcoholism in other people. To feel confident that those people are the ones "in the wrong" is perhaps a healthy view for one's own well-being, but it seems to me that each side condemning the other is a poor way to progress. Rather, to challenge is to highlight the existence of the problem and to find effective ways of informing, educating and ultimately changing the broader view.

I know a lot of that is work already under way, yet despite the fact that the American Medical Association and the British Medical Association have indeed defined alcoholism as a disease, there remains a very poor attitude towards those in need of help for their alcoholism even within the medical community. This can't be described simply as "their problem not mine," but is in fact a challenge that requires facing and effectively dealing with as a matter of some urgency.

Ultimately, I agree with the quote I gave from Iriss: broadly speaking, society has a lot of work to do on the issue of alcoholism. Since we're all in the society, that means we all have a lot of work to do.