There are many kinds of alcoholics. (The figures I shall give you are rough estimates.) There are two kinds of addicts. One is the primary addict—the person who suffers from the beginning of youth. He is an alcoholic from the day he takes his first drink, though he may not know it. There are members of Alcoholics Anonymous who are under fifteen. There is one I know by name in Des Moines who is thirteen years old. I know another in Davenport, Iowa, who is seventeen. There are scores under twenty who are members of Alcoholics Anonymous. They didn't begin drinking when they were two years old. The one who is thirteen began drinking when he was thirteen, and in six months he had all the appearances of a skid-row bum. You say, How could this happen in somebody's home? Well, he comes from a good home, and it happened right there. The alcoholic is a master of deception and a genius at self-deception. Until you have worked with one you have no idea what I am talking about. This fellow was drunk right under his mother's nose, and she didn't know it. And why should she? Nobody drank in her home. She had never seen anyone drunk close at hand. This boy got away with it for weeks. My point is that this kind of person (and about a third of all alcoholics fall into this category) is an alcohol addict from the day he takes a drink. The old temperance literature that said, "Never take the first drink," is certainly very applicable to this group of people. But, unfortunately, you cannot tell who they are. There are many subtypes within this primary group.
The second group of alcoholics, roughly two thirds, develop alcoholism through a prolonged process of habituation. In other words, they drink and drink and drink, and eventually become alcoholics. There are many kinds of these too—beginning with the Frenchman who drinks his bottle of wine at every meal. Did you know that 7 per cent of Frenchman drink two or more liters of wine a day? And a liter is approximately a quart. One cannot do that for more than fifteen or twenty years without becoming an alcoholic. He may never be drunk to the observable eye, but he is an alcoholic by all medical definitions. He will have all the symptoms.
There are many kinds, I repeat, of these people who are secondary alcoholics. Now what causes this? Why do we have alcoholics? Why is it that a man can drink every day for years and never become an alcoholic? And there are millions of them. And why is it that right alongside of them a fellow drinks only two days and becomes an alcoholic? This is part of the puzzle; this is part of the problem; this is one of the reasons why there is a great deal of confusion about alcoholism. On the one hand many of the temperance people say that alcohol is the cause of alcoholism; remove alcohol and there will be no more alcoholism. That is perfectly obvious, of course. You cannot have alcoholism without alcohol. But if you are at all realistic, you know that the world has never existed long without alcohol and is very unlikely to do so in the future. Even in prohibition days there were alcoholics. After all, if you cannot get alcohol in its pure form you can always use Sterno, witch hazel, or rubbing alcohol. You can always get drunk with a little ingenuity. As a matter of fact, we have some superalcoholics in the United States today who don't drink alcohol as we think of it at all—they drink nothing but what is known as canned heat. They say that plain alcohol doesn't have enough kick, and they go on to something stronger. So, by simply saying that alcohol is the cause of alcoholism, we are shutting our eyes to many other facets of the problem, and we are ignoring the need for people to help those who are victims.
Alcohol Education
I believe in alcohol education. I have spent the past five years of my life dinning this into the ears of people on two continents. I think this is the only way we can educate the people regarding this thing, and we are making tremendous progress. Drinking in the United States is decreasing markedly. Contrary to all the calamity howling you may have heard, the per capita consumption of beer and hard liquor is going down steadily, and has been doing so for the past five years. The number of drinkers in the United States is decreasing about 10 million in ten years. But there is a ten-to fifteen-year lag between the time one begins drinking and the appearance of alcoholism. If no new drinkers began after today, we would still keep producing 200,000 more alcoholics a year for the next ten to twenty years. This is part of the problem.
Furthermore, when we say alcohol is the cause of alcoholism we are ignoring the other 40 to 50 million people who drink and keep on drinking and are never going to be alcoholics. Some of these people are the finest in the community. And if you would say to one of these individuals that alcohol is the cause of alcoholism, he would be almost sure to ask, "Then why am I not an alcoholic?" You would have some difficulty in answering him and would pro-ably say, "But you will be someday." "Oh, no, I won't," would be his reply. "My grandfather drank for fifty years. My father drank for fifty years. My mother drank for fifty years, They all died pillars of the community. I never saw them drunk in my life." Puzzling, isn't it?
Now there are some things we know about the causes of alcoholism. There are physiological causes, and there are psychological causes; there are cultural causes, philosophical causes, and religious causes. They all play their part with various kinds of alcoholics. I think I should tell you that every case is different. Any generalizations we may make must be predicated upon the statement that no two alcoholics are alike. If they were, it would be much easier to treat the problem. What are these problems?
We know from years of study that there are some people who are more susceptible to alcoholic addiction than others. Alcohol is a habit-forming drug, so defined by the World Health Organization. But there are degrees of susceptibility to the addiction-producing properties of various drugs. One person can take twenty shots of morphine and not become a morphine addict. Another takes two shots and is an absolute, hooked addict. We know this is true of every drug except heroin. These wide varieties constitute physiological problems.
Psychological Problems
It is with the psychological problems that I would like to conclude, because, in my opinion, they are the more important, they are the more widespread, and I think they explain many of the problems among ex-Seventh-day Adventists. We know that most of the damage that comes to our personalities comes in our early life. The Catholic Church was very wise when it said, "Give me a child until he is seven." Modern psychology clearly supports the idea that those first seven years, plus the nine months before, are the most important years in the life of an individual. When the child does not get the emotional sustenance he needs, the bases for alcoholism and/or personality defects are laid.
What are these basic personality needs? One is affection; another is belonging, the sense of being a part of something. A third is the enjoyment of sense pleasure. The groundwork for personality defects and alcoholism can be laid in the home of an ascetic. If one considers it bad to enjoy the senses of the eye, the ear, the touch, the taste, the smell, and in its proper place, sex, one is laying the foundation of a potential alcoholic. In other words, the Puritan home could be blamed for some alcoholics. A fourth need is the sense of recognition and approval. A fifth is acceptance and understanding. Lack of these damages personality, and this helps to lay the foundation for rebellion, of which alcoholism may be one form. So, some of the causes come from the failure of the home to provide for the basic personality needs of the child.
What types of homes produce these problems? Research indicates four basic types. One is the authoritarian home. There was a cartoon in the Washington Post recently that was a classic illustration of the authoritarian home. Dennis was standing in the corner; beside him was a little chair and on the chair was a Teddy bear. Dennis was saying to the Teddy bear, "Now you stay there until I tell you to leave, and you've got to do it because I'm bigger than you are!" This depicts the authoritarian home, which says, "You do it because it's right, or else!" This attitude is not limited to any one group and some Adventist homes fall into this category.
The second kind of home is the success-worship home. This does not appear often in our church, but I have lived near homes where something unpleasant happened unless the child came home with all A's. You've got to be a success, you've got to achieve, you've got to make money, you've got to be the president! Third is the moralistic home. A fourth is the home where there is the rejection of the child. We probably have our share of these four types of homes in our denomination, therefore we also may be guilty of producing some alcoholics.
We have indicated that no one really knows exactly what produces an alcoholic. However, we can say that there are some things that do not produce an alcoholic. We know, for example, that it is not hereditary, and any evidence that seems to indicate that it is, needs to be re-examined.
What actually develops is that alcoholism may result from the environment of an alcoholic, and may be attributed to heredity with the adage, "Like father, like son." But we have been totally unable to discover any hereditary factors.
Characteristics of Alcoholics
All alcoholics have at least four characteristics, possibly five. Some may have others, but these four or five are common to most of them. Number one is a feeling of ambivalence toward authority. The alcoholic resents authority but he has to have it, and he resents this fact. He may have a domineering parent or mate. He needs this to live, but he hates it because he needs it. Second, the potential alcoholic has a low frustration point. This makes it easy for him to seek release quickly, more quickly than the average, normally integrated person. Third, an alcoholic has dreams of grandiosity. He is notably a daydreamer. He thinks of himself more highly than he ought to think. This is typical.
Fourth, he is likely to be a perfectionist. Notice how this pattern fits: "I am a perfectionist, I fail, I have a low frustration point, I get drunk." These things all tie together; they are part of a pattern. And fifth, alcoholics as a class have very poor self-esteem. Now notice this again: "Dreams of grandiosity; I would like to be a big shot, sometimes I think I could be, but really I'm a worm."
There are people with these characteristics who are not alcoholics. If you never start to drink you never become an alcoholic, but you may be a potential alcoholic just the same. We should not ridicule or condemn the alcoholic who may have found this means of escape that we have not found. He may be no worse than some of us. Remember, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."
Someone, very wise, said a long time ago, "You never fully understand alcohol as a problem until you understand it as a solution." In other words, the person who is an alcoholic takes alcohol as the solution to his problems. Alcoholics are not a happy people; they do not enjoy life. Alcohol becomes the solvent in which they find relief.
There are many psychological and psychosomatic and psychiatric theories as to the causes of alcoholism. If you begin reading, you should know beforehand that there is no unified psychological theory about the causes of alcoholism.
One set of psychiatrists insists that alcoholism is a repressed homosexuality factor. The Menninger Clinic in Kansas maintains that alcoholism is the result of a tendency to suicide. There are very excellent schools of psychology that insist that alcoholism is the result of an overprotective mother plus a severely repressive father, which produces an emotionally stunted individual who finds the adult world impossible and turns to alcohol for a solution. There are many who fit this pattern. A psychiatrist frequently sees only a very narrow group of alcoholics; he rarely sees a cross section, yet from his practice he draws his theories. Furthermore, many students of alcoholism believe that people go to psychiatrists because they find in a particular psychiatrist some form of relief. Consequently the practice of any individual psychiatrist often tends to be made up of the same kind of people. To put it another way, a psychiatrist takes only those patients for whom he wishes to work. Hence individual psychiatrists and psychiatric clinics tend to draw only certain segments of the alcoholic population. This probably helps to explain why there is no unified psychoanalytic theory concerning the causes of alcoholism.
We can say this, however: If we have an imperfectly integrated personality, we are much more likely to become an alcoholic than if we do not have it. And if we have a mature personality we are much less likely to become an alcoholic. The proportion of those with neurotic and psychoneurotic problems among alcoholics is far higher than in the general population.
For our own encouragement and our Christian understanding, we must remember that the only thing that makes an alcoholic different from a nonalcoholic is the fact that he has been drinking alcohol. We should be increasingly thankful to God that we find ourselves in an environment where, with all the problems we may have inherited and acquired, we do not easily find recourse to alcohol for the solution of them. If we have reached adulthood, thirty years of age, our chances of ever turning are extremely slim. But just think of the millions of people who find themselves in an environment where drinking is handy, and everyone with a problem has its solution at his fingertips. Don't be mistaken, alcohol is the handiest, easiest solution to human problems that man has ever found. True, it is a false seducer, but it is attractive.
So if we want to help the alcoholic and give him hope, we must catch him early enough, before physical damage sets in; and, second, we can impress upon every social drinker the symptoms of alcoholism, the dangers of alcoholism, to the extent that he will either decrease his social drinking or blot it out altogether. This is not temperance as we normally think of the term. But these two aims go together.
I do not believe in fear techniques; they are the poorest motivations in the world, but I would rather have somebody refrain from cutting off his finger because he is afraid than not refrain from cutting it off. It is much better for a man to say, "I love my Lord, I want to keep my body holy to Him," than to have him say, "I'm scared of being an alcoholic, and so I don't drink." But it is better that he does not drink, whatever the reason. We must take people where they are and reach them with the message with which they will be reached.
I don't care what the method used may be, if it will save mankind from this horrible situation, let us use whatever method is at hand. In this case the end justifies the means, although normally it does not. If the fear technique is what is needed to reach certain people, we should use it. However much we dislike this business, the fact is we will have to face the victims of the liquor traffic, and no one is in a better position to help them than the minister. The literature on counseling the alcoholic invariably states that the first person to whom an alcoholic should be sent is the minister. A wonderful opportunity of saving these souls lies before us if we can only understand their problem and appreciate and love them and help them find relief.
