13 November 2016

Alcohol use and occasional drunkenness were pervasive in colonial America, but it wasn’t until per capita alcohol consumption began to rise dramatically between the Revolutionary War and 1830 that Americans began to look at excessive drinking in a new way and with a new language. The harbinger of this new view was Benjamin Rush’s 1784 treatise An Inquiry Into The Effects of Ardent Spirits in which Rush referred to the “habitual use of ardent spirits” as an “odious disease.” ⁴ In the 1840s the Washingtonians, America's first society of recovered alcoholics, spoke not of alcoholism but of drunkenness and referred to themselves as confirmed drinkers, drunkards, hard cases, inveterate cases, sots, tipplers, and inebriates.

There’s the most vital question about the alcohol addiction. It has no definite answer so far. Also, it serves as a divarication that divides the possibility to overcome the addiction into two alternatives. The question is to what extend the choice to drink or not to drink is in the power of a human? The advocates of viewing alcoholism as a disease take craving as its basic category.