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Show Alcoholics Anonymous Works To Arrest The Problem Early Inga is 23 years old. She had her first whiskey sour at 16; a year later, she was mixing liquor with uppers and downers. She dropped out of school, decided to hitchhike hit-chhike from her home in Atlanta to San Francisco Fran-cisco and start a whole new life. She drank and drugged as she thumbed her way west. In Kansas, she was raped an beaten and left for dead on I he highway. At the hospital, she was detoxified and introduced in-troduced to Alcoholics Anonymous. John is 51 years old. He graduated cum laude from Yale in 1950 and started up the career ladder at IBM. From the start, he liked his two martinis at intact; have never seen the inside of a jail or lived in a fourth-rate hotel or slept in a hallway on skid row. They may not have had blackouts or taken the morning drink. They may not have had the shakes and the sweats in the long, lonely nights. But they know they have a problem with alcohol. In large measure, these alcoholics owe I heir early recovery in A. A. to the fact that the disease of alcoholism has been recognized, at all levels, as a national health problem. According Ac-cording to a recent A. A. survey of its membership, mem-bership, 41 percent credit another A. A. member for introducing them to the Fellowship; 38 percent came "on my illnesses -- heart disease, cancer, diabetes - alcoholism can strike people of any age; and it develops at different rates in different dif-ferent individuals. Nor does it matter how much or how little you drink. The important question is: What is your drinking doing to you? How is it affecting your life? Alcoholism is a progressive illness; as long as the alcoholic keeps on drinking, it will grow progressively worse. Until the drinker chooses to stop. There is no known "cure" for alcoholism, but the disease can be arrested with the help of A. A. - BEFORE the horror stories start. lunch, cocklails before dinner and brandy after, but he knew how to handle his liquor. He married and produced three children, belonged to the right clubs, and was on a first-name basis with the right people. Then his drinking got out of hand; he had the shakes, the sweats, wound up in one drying-out drying-out place after another. His wife insisted that he see their minister, who referred him to a psychiatrist. But John kept on drinking. In time, he lost his job, the mortgage was foreclosed on the house, his wife left him, the children would have no part of him. Those endless nights, his bedroom was a Bowery. That's when he found A. A. Just how far down the path of alcoholism do you have to go in order to qualify for membership mem-bership in A. A? As these two true stories show, not far. ..or else very far; hitting "bottom" is an individual thing. Inga drank for seven years, John, for about 30. She stuck mainly to wine and beer because they were cheaper; he could afford the hard stuff. But they both qualified as alcoholics -because drinking had made both their lives unmanageable. And once they crossed the "invisible line" that separates the alcoholic from the heavy drinker, there was no going back. In A. A., time was when virtually all the members had lost families and jobs, to say nothing of time spent in hospitals, jails, and skid rows across the country. Today, however, the portrait of membership has changed. Newer members come in speaking of days lost from work rather than of lost jobs. Most of them still have families own;" 24 percent through counseling and therapy; 21 percent because of a family member; and 10 percent through their family doctor. Moreover: --The under-30 membership in A. A. increased by nearly 50 percent in the past three years. --At a typical A. A. meeting, one out of every three people is a woman - a jump of 33 percent over the past 10 years. Virtually all occupations oc-cupations are represented by alcoholics in A. A. Among men, for example, 29 percent are in sales and business; 27 percent in crafts; 26 percent in the professions (such as medicine, law); and 11 percent are semiskilled. Among the women, 40 percent call themselves homemakers; 21 percent, per-cent, professionals; 18 , percent, office, clerical; 14 percent in sales and business; and seven percent skilled and semiskilled. Some A.A.'s may have been referred to the Fellowship by a doctor, psychiatrist, or clergyman. Or, the alcoholic's spouse or a friend may have read about A. A. in a national magazine or newspaper. Or, the alcoholic may have seen a movie or television drama dealing with alcoholism and A. A. Moreover, such alcoholics may work for some of the thousand or so companies in the country that have developed programs to combat alcoholism among employees - as early on in the progression of the illness as possible, before chronic absenteeism ab-senteeism and dimishing performance on the job have rendered ren-dered the worker unemployable. Like most other |
