You drink with a passion friends don't have. You deny you have a problem as long as you can. Sometimes it's masked by a very high tolerance for alcohol. In general, alcoholics drink daily, associate almost exclusively with other heavy drinkers and have trouble stopping once they've started drinking. Booze, counselors say, is always in the picture somewhere.
Alcoholics create excuses for drinking.
They'll take a quick drink before a social occasion, saying it's just to calm them down. In reality, counselors say, they're giving themselves permission to drink when, deep down, they know they shouldn't. Rooney began noticing he had an alcohol problem in the summer of 1996. His father had just passed away. He was in the midst of a bitter re-election campaign.