Monat said:
As for the belief that a person can inherit a predisposition
towards alcoholism, I don't think so. My father was an alcoholic, in fact he died when I was 2 years old in an drunk driving accident. His father and mother were alcoholics, and theirs were too and so on. But the chain was broken with me because I wasn't raised in an alcoholic household. I don't even like the taste of alcohol, and its not like I am just not given the chance to be an alcoholic, I'm in the Navy enough said.
No offense, but you are just one person. That doesn't make for much of a conclusive argument. Perhaps you simply didn't receive the genetic predisposition for alcoholism from your parents that your parents got from theirs.
As an alcoholic, myself, I am convinced by my own experiences, and by many discussions about this with other alcoholics, and non-alcoholics, that my brain reacts differently to alcohol than the brains of non-alcoholics. I experience a kind of blinding euphoria from drinking even a fairly small amount of alcohol that's so powerful that I have no certain way of controlling how much more I'll drink if I drink any alcohol at all. Non-alcoholics do not experience this euphoria, and they don't experience the kind of mental blindness that come with it, that renders an otherwise completely reasonable person incapable of making reasonable decisions regarding the use of alcohol. The difference is so stark, in fact, that most non-alcoholics can't grasp that this is a real condition going on within alcoholics. Yet over the years I have met and discussed alcoholism and how it works in literally thousands of people, and I hear the same anecdotal experiences over and over.
Some people's brains react to alcohol differently than other people's and I'm sure (and there are many studies to back me up) that this particular aspect of brain structure is often inherited from our genetic predicessors, though it often skips generations, too, for some reason.
Just as a side note, liking the taste of alcohol, or not, has nothing at all to do with whether a person becomes alcoholic. I didn't like the taste of alcohol, either, when I first drank it, yet I drank it to excess the very first time, got horribly sick and hung over, and still couldn't wait until I could get my hands on some more alcohol and do it all over again. That's how powerful the euphoric effect was on me, even at 10 or 11 years old. It wasn't the taste or smell or whatever of the alcohol that I so fell in love with, it was that euphoric effect that it had on my brain. It was being drunk, that I really wanted, not the alcohol, itself.