Be like the whole world

The answers to these questions seem evident: to keep your health, to relieve your family from sufferings. One may even use something commonplace: “Be like the whole world”, “Live a normal life”. But whether it’s a weighty argument for an alcohol addict we don’t know. Our discourse can be compared with the following conclusions justifying relatively lower malignancy compared to other form of chemical addiction. For example, the addiction to heroin and cocaine develops more quicky, an unhealthy interest in them appears much earlier. It turns out that addicts, going this path at a young age have nowhere to go back; in their mind there no values to prefer to the addiction. Thus, we’ve an important addition to the rational model. The deliverance is possible as a way back. However, before we view this point in details, let’s think about the following character. It can be prototyped by John O'Brien’s Sera. Her example shows the average life can’t be rejected as a desired aim. Not many people view their lives as a fiasco, if they’ve never flown to the outer space or invented a cure to a fatal disease and won a Nobel prize. The social inequality placing us from birth at different points can stimulate some movement even in the lower stratification segment. From my point of view, the idea that the addict’s destiny to be an addict is incorporated in human genes is not quite proven. Nevertheless, it isn’t uncommon when a potential addict is born in a family of alcoholics with generations of alcoholics in their genealogy. As a matter of fact, the addictive behavior model in such situation is the dominant model they learn as the only available one. Thus, Sera’s example shows a way to overcome the problem – break out of the circle imposed by the destiny become like everyone else, buy a house, get married, have children, maybe get a decent education. There’re socialization programs, including therapeutic communities, half-way houses designed to help such people walk the necessary distance to a normal life.