A New Vaccine For Drinking Could Keep Alcoholics Sober

Well, we've had similar drugs (though not vaccines) for a while I believe, and they don't always work as they should.

A guy I worked with was a recovering alcoholic on a "return-to-work" program. As a part of this program he had to take antabuse to stop him from drinking again. He died from a fatal heart attack within a month after he started working. It turns out he'd secretly still continued to drink even while on antabuse, which put an immense strain on his heart (antabuse gives tachycardia on consuming alcohol), causing the heart attack. Sad story.

Alcholics have a really strong urge to drink, even though it causes discomfort.

> But with the biological piece of the disease taken care of, a big part of the battle is already won.

I completely disagree. IMO biology is responsible for a very very small part of the problem of addiction. As somebody who lost his mother to liver disease stemming from her addictions, these types of treatments lead to even more dangerous outcomes.

A week in rehab will remove the biological dependence of alcohol.

My mom's addictions started as a teenager with food. Food was her indulgence of choice. After years of trying to rid herself of the consequences of that addiction by dieting, she turned to weight loss surgery to help. Sure, she lost a lot of weight but this merely relieved the symptoms of her disease and did nothing the disease itself.

Years later she no longer possessed the biological ability to be addicted to food so she turned to alcohol instead. The weight loss surgery combined with only 4 years of alcohol abuse (with several stints of sobriety) was enough to ruin her liver to a point of no return.

I don't dispute that this drug could be effective for the newly sober individuals who need a little extra push to remain sober. A doctor that administers this vaccine without careful followup and psychological treatment is doing the patient a disservice.

Let's not kid ourselves, this "vaccine" does nothing but mask the symptoms of the disease leaving the patient troubled, alone and without help.

Addiction is a lifelong disease and it needs to be treated as such. Without proper treatment (psychological help), the disease will morph and before you know it have ahold of your life once again.

I am 1/4 Japanese, and have the "natural" genetic version of this. It does not stop me from drinking, though I naturally drink a lot less frequently than my peers because it is unpleasant. I don't drink casually, because the pleasure of a slight buzz is overwhelmed with the discomfort of having a hot face/chest and difficulty breathing (feels a lot like a mild asthma attack - like something heavy is sitting on your chest and making it hard to take a full breath). But at a special event or a party or something, yeah, I can and will still get drunk.

Also, as almost anyone of Asian descent can tell you, you can take a Pepcid AC (or the generic equiv) around 30-45 minutes before drinking and it slows the conversion of alcohol into acetaldehyde, making drinking with this condition more tolerable.

For someone with an actual, problematic addiction to alcohol, I don't know if the side-effects of an acetaldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency will be enough to stop drinking.

What I am saying is that if you coerce someone into getting out of an addiction that he got into because he has been having some frustrations with his emotional/social life, then you are just pushing the frustration relief that alchool has been giving him so far, into something else (another drug addiction, over-eating violence, ...).

You can't automagically fix the brain. We live by feelings, which are the world most powerfull "things", in both positive and negative sense.

If an alchoolist had by himself the means to rationalize why he is an alchoolist and what to fix in his life or mindset to not be one, then he would have stopped himself immediately.

But he got into this in the first place and because he has not stopped yet, it means that he has not yet achieved these understandings.

I am no psychologist here, just a random guy who, from time to time has been experiencing some time frames of deep demotivation and feelings of social inadequateness due to some parents relationship issues and probably a bit of over-sensitivity. In those time frames alchool consumption got higher than average (but didn't reach an alchoolist level).

So I am just elaborating on what at that time would have meant to me to make me hate my only stress relief (which also worked to me as a little mood-booster to push me to have a bit more social life). Where would I find another stress-relief ? Inside myself ? I was not ready to understand myself, and sometime you just don't have around you the right friends or people who will help you doing that. So I would have probably stuck to some other substance.

As for everything (and as we say many times for IT), when you don't know something, you don't even know what you don't know about it, and so wheter or not and where you need to search for help.

It's only now that I can rationally understand what was going on. But at the time I'd probably told you that I had no issues, and that anyway, I was following a "right" path.

If I was a totally-alone person, if you had fed me that pill and wash your hands afterwards (which is exactly how modern-world government & health care systems would manage it) then you would have basically got me lost in some other psychologically wrong behaviour.

Not everyone is like me, I know, but I think that: magic pill + hand washing = streets are clear from drunken people -> governent & lucky people are happier -> general society applaudes on itself for being able to defeat alchoolism plague -> unlucky people are just struggling somewhere else with other dangerous stress relief: bad habits, behaviours or substances.

At least alchoolism is visible, it's not hidden like some hard to see pathology with subtle or no symptoms at all, so let's use this evident symptomatology to cure the cause, and not the effects, let's just not hide them !

Clear now?