Welcome to the forums, man. This is an awesome place, you'll find a lot of people (myself included) are right there with you. Sorry to hear about your friend.. but as you know already, drinking wont' make it better. All drinking does is causes you to put your head in the sand and ignore issues you will have to deal with eventually.. while at the same time, eating away at your soul and making you less ABLE to deal with these issues when you do eventually deal with them. It's kinda like pausing a movie, but when you unpause the movie, the quality gets worse.
Good luck pal!