(ABC News) Whether it’s binge drinking or addiction to alcohol, Americans have a real problem with the bottle.
So says new research released Monday, which found that nearly one out of three Americans can expect to have a problem with alcohol at some time during their lives.
“We found that 30.3 percent of the U.S. population at some time in their lives — though maybe not currently — has had an alcohol use disorder,” said study author Bridget Grant of the Division of Biometry and Epidemiology at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Compared to 9% of marijuana smokers who develop some form of clinical dependency.
But perhaps most sobering was the fact that few with alcohol problems ever reached out for help.
“What we found was that very few people who have lifetime disorders ever seek treatment,” Grant says, adding that only 24 percent of those suffering from alcohol dependency seek help. The percentage of those seeking treatment for alcohol abuse is even lower, at 7 percent.
Have you considered arresting people for possession, sales, or home-brewing of alcohol? Dr. Kevin Sabet tells me that this is an excellent way of getting people into treatment. ”The activist-phrase ‘treatment over incarceration’ or ‘treatment versus incarceration’ is an accepted term within the drug policy discourse,” Dr. Sabet writes regarding the 1000% increase in marijuana treatment admissions in New York City, coinciding with Mayor Guiliani’s crackdown on marijuana smokers. “Indeed, this paper suggests that law enforcement intensity may be one of many different activities that could increase treatment entry.”
If it works so well with pot smokers why wouldn’t you apply the prohibit-arrest-sentence-to-treatment model to alcohol users, who are getting into domestic abuse problems, impaired driving problems, and aggressiveness problems unlike cannabis users? Oh, yeah, because we tried that in the 1920s and it didn’t work.
