Originally Posted by
caboblanco 
The US promotes their recovery culture on countries like Italy where the drinking age is 16 and it's legal to let minors drink with adult supervision. They have a much lower binge drinking and alcoholism rate then us. The
culture is different. They don't see alcohol as a highly dangerous poison. That is cultural based. Its not genetics. There are plenty of Italian American alcoholics. They had to move to this country to get a higher abuse rate.
Going along with what I was saying above - Italians were one of the first to be introduced to alcohol....about 7,000 years ago. They have had a much longer time to let natural selection take it's place and destroy those with a susceptability to alcoholism (which is why they have lower binge drinking and alcoholism rates, as you stated above). Comparatively, alcohol was introduced to the northern european countries some 1,500 years ago...a much less mount of time for natural selection to have properly killed off the ones afflicted with this disease. Then, look at Native Americans who suffer from very high rates of alcoholism....they were introduced to alcohol only 300 years ago. There is a correlation between length of time a culture has been exposed to alcohol and the rates of alcoholism due to heredity and natural selection.
Your last sentence...Are you implying that Italian American alcoholics became alcoholic because they moved here? Because of our culture? If so, I disagree. Clearly, alcoholism will never be truly gone entirely from any culture. I suspect if an Italian American is an alcoholic, it's because it was in his genes...not because he moved here.