I'm going to write openly as an alcoholic; one of those people you've been warned not to listen to. And no, I'm not going to do a remote diagnosis -- despite the misplaced enthusiasm of a few of our number, that's actually quite against the rules. In our world, addiction (to alcohol in particular) is entirely a matter for self-diagnosis.

In my case, that was easy. Take your estimated intake and multiply by eight, and don't skip a single day for six years. Add in the work-related consequences, the deaths of relationships, the physical damage to my heart, liver, vascular system (and the many, many mysterious injuries accumulated during periods of blackout) -- oh, and the sudden complete failure of my visual system one fine day in 1985, and the problem was as clear as the glass they make optical fibres out of. Getting out of the game with the degree of desperation I had to hand was actually fairly easy. If you can call the roller coaster ride of going sane when the only thing that had ever made sense was insanity easy...

And yet I know, and have known, a lot of people over the years whose drinking I would have considered normal, but whose lives were torn apart because of it. Believe it or not, they find it much harder to stay off the sauce, probably because the disincentive of the "remember when" isn't strong enough to outweigh the... um... I think the word that fits best here is ennui.

Are they clinically alcoholic? Probably not, at least in terms of th DSM. Our criteria are two simple tests: if you find that when you really want to quit you can't stay stopped, and if when you do drink you have little or no control over how much you drink, then you're welcome to join the party. But all of that is just about the booze (or beer, in your case and mine), and that is no more than an outward symptom. The actual physical addiction, the physical craving, can be broken after only a handful of days of detoxification.

No, the real issue is that there is something to life on the other side of the bottle cap that's better than what's on this side -- even given that we know what the other side looks, feels and smells like. Although other people might have seen alcohol as our problem, to us it was a solution -- the only solution we knew. When you distill the religious overtones out of a twelve step program (they all originated out of a pseudo-Christian revival movement, and we carry some unfortunate historical baggage because of it), what is left looks an awful lot like Dickens' A Christmas Carol. We face head-on the reality of our situation, resolve to fix as much of the damage we've done as possible, then get on with the task of finding joy and meaning in life. That's the whole program in a nutshell, whether the Bible-thumpers among us like it or not, and you don't need to be addicted to anything for something like that to turn a life around.

Try to see what the problem is. Alcohol is no more than an aid to procrastination -- the tendency toward avoidance would be there even if the beer was not. Find a way to let go of whatever's stuck in your craw. Sometimes just naming the demon is enough to remove its power. Often, it's a matter of voicing your feelings towards those who are pissing you off, doing so honestly but in a spirit of reconciliation. Then look at the good things you have at every opportunity available, smile to yourself, and share that smile with anyone you care about. Take nothing good for granted; treat it like the precious gift it is.

Sounds hokey, I know, but it pulled me back from the brink of death, and twenty-five years later, despite failed relationships and businesses, illness, deaths of loved ones, and my current condition, one that's robbed me of most of my intellectual capacity and mobility, I'm almost always the happiest guy in the room. I don't miss the drink. It seems it was only important to me when I wanted to hit the pause button on life. Once I learned that life is huge, I took the biggest bite I could out of its ass, and I'm still chewing.

One doesn't necessarily need a support group to make the transition from one life to the other. I needed a lot of help learning what it means to be a functioning human being, and that's what the meetings and the fellowship are all about. The book that started it all, though, was meant to be a self-help book, and a lot of people (certainly not the majority, nor even a mighty minority, but a significant number of people in absolute terms) have managed to make the turn alone.

Disclaimer: my function within the community for the last decade or so has been to deprogram folks who've made a religion out of a perfectly sound cognitive restructuring strategy. As an atheist, I had to mentally adjust the literature and jargon, but the core of the thing works, and for very well-understood reasons.