November 1 9 5 6

THE ABNORMAL DRINKING or generd disordered condition of the alcoholic b properly called a disease for the following reasons: First, the professions of medicine and psychiatry see in the alcoholic a condition which by their norms deserves to be called a disease. They are judge of what the label “disease” meam-and of whether the condition called alcoholism deserves that label. Second, recovered alcoholics cannot learn to drink normally. After yeam of sobriety they still react abnormally if they start drinking again. Why is this so-unless there is something inside them, physiological or psychological which makes them react that way? That something is rightly called pathological. Third, many scientists believe they have discovered a physiological alcoholic’s abnormal drinking. Although so far researchers in physiology have not been able to agree upon a clear, definite, organic or functional pathology in alcoholics generally, yet there is good reason for believing that in many a h holiq abnormal drinking results from a body pathology; and that in moat alcoholics, once they have become addicts, physiological changee have occuned which prevent them from ever becoming normal drinkers. Fourth, the psychological (and/or physiological) mechanisms involved in addiction considered generally, can properly be called pathological. The alcohol addict, once he has become an addict, has acquired a dependence on alcohol which is generally beyond his power to control, unaided. He drinks compulsively, the compulsion operating with more or less frequency, and more or less force. This addiction is often just as strong as drug addiction and the alcohol addict ends up with a habit so severe that it assumes pathological proportiom. Hence the addiction itself can be properly dwcribed as a form of illness or disease. John C. Ford, S. d.