There’re no medicines to treat the alcohol addiction. Those used nowadays (in the USA they use three types – Disulfiram, Naltrexone, Acamprosate) are just auxiliary ones. In general, we’re more than confident that no chemical agent, to cure the alcohol addiction can be invented at all, but let’s talk about it some other time. Even taking the addiction as an illness, this illness is treated by word, sometimes by magic. Actually, this way quite serious researches call the alcohol abuse hypnosis, a very popular treatment in the former USSR. Sometimes, today’s treatment of alcoholism is compared with the treatment of tuberculosis at the beginning of the previous century: steal a person from an unhealthy environment and send him or her to the highlands or a seacoast. Recalling my life in the USSR I can call this method “treatment with communism”. Models of such treatment could be found in Soviet sanatoria. Indeed, it’s quite logical way to fight the addiction: to put a customer to conditions that give no way for this deviant behavior and – according to the belief of the program founders – help him or her fall in love with a “healthy” lifestyle that could be led even outside the “treatment” monastery. However, this makes me remember a classical novel Asylum by William Seabrook that says: “My physical nerves were less jangled, my hands and mouth had stopped trembling, my general physical condition was perhaps improved, but this was merely because I hadn’t been drinking anything for two long months, and the only reason I hadn’t been drinking anything was that I had been locked up where I couldn’t get it.”
The Addiction Philosophy Map
