The Price of Alcoholism: Five Case Histories

No one is a typical alcoholic, and the only thing all alcoholics have in common is their addiction. That fact was re-emphasized by the reports of TIME correspondents who interviewed many of them across the U.S. and Canada, including the following:

JOE, 52, an Atlanta stockbroker, began his career as an alcoholic at 15 when he went camping with his brothers. One of the boys opened a bottle of wine, and Joe instantly discovered his weakness. "That night was it for me," he says. "I went looking for a drink in the morning, and I drank all the way through high school. I was in the grip of an insidious, progressive disease." Joe continued to drink through Harvard and the service, but when he went home again his parents sent him to a hospital for "aversion" therapy. "I stayed sober two or three months," he remembers. But for him, the aversion was only temporary.

Drinking, borrowing money, being arrested repeatedly, at 27 he was so far gone that he was not able to write his name. In December 1948 he went to Alcoholics Anonymous but fell off the wagon after only two months. In March he was back in A.A., and has been going to meetings ever since.

"People there welcomed me," he says. "My goal was to live. Survival, that's all. They told me that if I helped other people, I would receive and be helped myself. A funny thing happened. I got better. In two or three months I was in better shape than I had been in for five years. I needed a miracle and got it. But it's not over yet. It won't be over until I die."

ELIZABETH, 44, a Manhattan advertising woman, was a fierce teetotaler because both her parents were problem drinkers. At 35, facing the prospect of a mastectomy, Elizabeth went to her psychoanalyst. The doctor proposed that she try a drink to calm her fears. "I'll never forget the feeling," Elizabeth says. "It hit me instantly. This was something I'd been waiting for without knowing it, and I never wanted to be without it again. I felt so warm and calm and safe."

It turned out that she did not have cancer, but she went on drinking anyway, "right around the clock." Although she sipped almost a fifth of Scotch a day, it did not seem to affect her work. "I never got really drunk, never had a hangover." One night while waiting for a date she took an extra slug of Scotch "to be bright and special." Instead she stumbled and cut her forehead on the mantel. Her date found her bloodied and bleary and walked out. This shocked her so much that she went to A.A.

Elizabeth dried out for a while and then had a relapse, drinking more heavily than before. Finally she returned to the A.A. program, which she has followed successfully for five years. "Mine was one hell of a binge," she says, "and I consider my sobriety precious. I wouldn't do anything to jeopardize it."

JAY, 45, a Montreal journalist, says that he began drinking heavily "out of a sense of fatalism"; his father, mother and brother are all alcoholics.

"I turned into a chronic liar and charlatan, trying to cover up my affliction. I made raucous scenes and picked fights for no reason. I often wet my pants and vomited all over myself in public. I went to doctors and got tranquilizers, which I proceeded to combine with liquor, which made me even worse. I went to private clinics, public hospitals and even ended up in a mental home. I went to a priest and then to Alcoholics Anonymous. They were well-meaning people, but their piety seemed too facile to me, and I usually had to rush to the nearest bar every time I came out of a meeting. I was thrown into jail, mugged, and slept in the gutter. I stank, my gums bled, and my hands were too shaky to shave without a couple of drinks."

The turning point for Jay came when he awoke in a seedy hotel with the DTs. "My eyes were bulging from their sockets. My arms and legs flailed about like windmills. Then those black dots started spreading across the walls and ceilings, and I had to choke back a scream. This was the point at which I finally decided I wanted to live, not die, and forced myself to go get cured."

The cure came at Toronto's Donwood Institute, where he went into group therapy and was put on a daily dose of Antabuse, a drug that causes nausea, palpitations and anxiety at the first whiff of liquor. To ensure his long-term sobriety, a six-month supply was implanted under the skin of his abdomen. "I finally walked out--cured, tingling with life and vigor and almost hypersensitively aware. But as I saw a bar, the craving hit me so hard that I bent double. Was this the way it was going to be all my life? The answer apparently is yes. The desire would fade, but somewhere--in the clink of glasses or the sight of good red wine--is the trigger. It is a trigger that I dare not pull."

BARBARA, 26, a Miami divorcee with two young children, started drinking when she was 13. "My mother was a heavy drinker," she says, "and we always had lots of liquor around the house." Married soon after high school, she became pregnant and--at doctor's orders--began downing a shot of brandy to help her sleep. "I didn't like the taste, but before my baby was born I was drinking half a bottle a night."

She and her husband eventually separated, and Barbara started to vary her drinking habits. "The kids were one and three, and I sipped wine while I prepared their lunch. Within six months, I went from a small bottle a day to a gallon, then on to martinis and Scotch. It could be blowing a blizzard, and I'd trek through anything to get my bottles."

"People are so drink-oriented," she adds. "It's the acceptable thing to do. You never go to a party or dinner without drinks." Guidelines that she set for herself--never drink in the morning or before driving--were discarded, and arrests for drunkenness began to pile up. Sent to a detoxification center after one eight-day binge, she sneaked out to a bar, then, at 5 a.m., accepted a ride back from one of the male patrons. He invited her to stop at his apartment for a drink. She had to fend off a rape attempt, suffering a broken jaw and scarring cuts on the face. "I thought I'd hit the bottom before," she says through the wires that still hold her teeth together, "but now I realized that this was it."

After attending a Bade County alcohol rehabilitation center for the past three months, Barbara is sober and plans to remain that way. She fears, however, that her drinking may have permanently hurt her children. "They remember my wine-drinking days when I'd throw up in their wastebasket. Now if they see me drinking a Coke, my older girl will come over and taste it and then reassure the younger one: 'It's O.K.' "

BOB, 18, a New York City carpenter, started off on a bottle of Canadian whisky from the family liquor cabinet when he was twelve, and from that moment would drink whatever and whenever he could. "If it was beer, I laughed a lot. If it was wine, I would get very mellow. If it was whisky, I was sure to go wild and get into a fight."

Kicked out of school for fighting a guidance counselor in what he calls a "temper blackout," Bob was sent to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric examination. "At the nut house they told me I wasn't an alcoholic because of my age. I was told that if I handled my emotional problems, I would be able to drink normally." Bob nonetheless tried A.A., not once but three times between binges. "I just hadn't decided that I wouldn't drink any more."

Finally the A.A. "cure" took when Bob was at the ripe age of 15. Sobriety has not been easy. A well-meaning social worker pressured Bob to take tranquilizers to relieve his tension. He refused. "If I did that," he asks, "then why not drink? I was tired of being told that 1) I'm alcoholic, and 2) I need to take tranquilizers to survive. If I had taken drugs, I would have been in the nut house again in a matter of months."

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