I’m an alcoholic, and my name is Dottie Shore. Hi. Hi. Oh, you know, this waiting has been just terrible. I don’t know. It’s, uh, it’s nice to be the last speaker because you get so much inspiration from the p- speakers beforehand. And my God, the days go by, and your mouth gets drier, and your hands get wetter, and it’s just not working out. I’m grateful to God, and I’m grateful to all you people for having me here. I was born and raised in Reno. This is my hometown. And I’ve often thought when I was first early sober, if they ever invited me back to speak at a high school, uh, reunion, they’d probably run me out of town if I told them the story. But coming back to Reno and speaking at AA meeting, an entirely different ballgame. There’s no doubt of it. My grandfather and grandmother came in from Maine and homesteaded in Reno, and my grandfather was a contractor, and he built the courthouse and all the schools. My mother was born here, I was born here, and my children were born here.

So, uh, I love Reno. And it’s funny, I’ve been away from Reno a long time, living in Southern California, and anybody down there mentions Reno, and it makes my heart jump. So I guess you can take me out of Reno, but you can’t take Reno out of me, and I love it. I’d like to share with you some things that I learned in Alcoholics Anonymous that were so helpful to me. We do a lot of talking about alcoholism, and we do a lot of talking about the disease, but very few people know anything about our disease. They know how to put us in jail, how to detoxify us, how to give us vitamin B and calcium, and call us a lot of names, but they don’t know exactly what’s wrong with us. Why are we the ones that are in this room? Why are we alcoholics, and why are some people not? The Institute on Alcoholism is the only medical group that I know that’s ever done anything on our research of alcoholism. And many years ago, they put out a paper, and I wish they had it out again.

They took six alcoholics and hospitalized them until by blood count and urinalysis, there was no alcohol in their system, and they asked for six non-alcoholic volunteers. And they took these 12 people, and they gave them a pint of whiskey to drink, and they waited 24 hours from the last drink. They began testing again. In every one of the non-alcoholics, they found it totally out of the body or in the bladder. However, in every one of the alcoholics, they found it in the spinal fluid. Now, they found out that we have a, what they call a biochemical imbalance. We have a gland that fails to function. They know the pancreas fails in the diabetic. They don’t even know the gland that fails to function in you and I. They call it an X factor. I got an X factor here someplace. It doesn’t work very good. But once that breaks down, either by the use of alcohol, it never functions, and I don’t believe it ever functions in my case.