Posted by fredjoiners on May 30, 2008
New Delhi: Alcoholics who want to quit drinking have only place where they can meet with like-minded people: Alcoholics Anonymous.
At an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting in Delhi, people will tell you that they have been “sober” for six months, or six years and even 16 years but it would take is just one drink to set them back on a path to disaster.
Alcoholics Anonymous gives the courage and willpower not to drink again, they say. “One alcoholic talking to another—that’s what works. That’s what happened in 1935 when our two co-founders met. When one alcoholic talks to another, he stays sober. The guy who’s ripe and ready will come and stay with AA,” says one member.
There are around 2 million AA members worldwide but the numbers in India are shockingly low. AA has been in the country for 26 years but it has just 5,000 to 8,000 thousand members in the country, most of them men.
There is a reason for that: alcoholism is largely under-detected in urban India and rarely even acknowledged as a disease.
AA doesn’t recruit members but provides support and survival strategies to people who walk in and want to quit drinking. “AA taught me to start loving myself and taking care of myself. Their programmes help me become aware of my own problems,” says a member.
Unfortunately, not everyone is ready for help. “I have seen lots of people die even after coming to AA, as they were not able to do what it takes to stop drinking. I know somebody who died two weeks ago,” says a recovering alcoholic.
Full story at IBN Live, India
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Posted in Alcoholics Anonymous, Drinking days, Families, Recovery, Self-help, alcohol, alcoholism, disease, spiritual, treatment | Tagged: aa, India, New Delhi, Willpower | No Comments »
Posted by fredjoiners on May 26, 2008
Few Drinkers Understand Alcohol Serving Units, Limits
British researchers say that drinkers often fail to understand how many units of alcohol are contained in the drinks they consume and don’t know the government’s daily recommended consumption limits, the BBC reported.
The U.K. Department of Health surveyed 1,429 drinkers and found that more than a third of those questioned did not know that the government recommends capping daily alcohol consumption at 2-3 units per day for women and 3-4 units daily for men.
Moreover, three-quarters of drinkers failed to realize that a large glass of wine contains three units of alcohol (most thought it contained two units).
“Glass sizes have grown larger and the strength of many wines and beers has increased, so it’s no wonder some of us have lost track of our alcohol consumption,” said Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo.
Researchers also found that 58 percent of drinkers did not realize that a double gin and tonic contained two units of alcohol, and that 35 percent did not know that a pint of beer contains more than two units of alcohol (a pint of some strong lagers actually equates to three units of alcohol).
The British government has launched a public-information campaign called Know Your Limits to try to educate drinkers about the alcohol contained in typical drinks as well as recommended daily limits. “We aim to give people the facts about how many units are in different drinks in a nonjudgmental way,” said Primarolo. “Then they can then make their own assessments about how much they want to drink in the future.”
From Join Together Online
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Posted in Drinking days, Drugs, Harm Reduction, Health, Research reports, Youth, alcohol, men, women | 1 Comment »
Posted by fredjoiners on May 23, 2008
Florida Teen Dies After Mixing Alcohol and Energy Drinks
A 10th-grade student from Wellington, Fla., died after reportedly drinking alcohol and energy drinks at a party, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.
Ashley Ramnauth, 16, went to a party with friends and was dropped off at home afterwards; later, a friend found her unconscious. Her parents and the friend administered CPR and called 911, but Ramnauth was pronounced dead at a local hospital less than two hours later.
Ashley “apparently made a bad decision to consume energy drinks and alcohol in combination,” according to a statement from her family, who added that the student “did not have a lot of experience with alcohol and did not have a known problem with alcohol.”
“She was a straight-A student and very determined,” said Jesse Dallsingh, 16, of Lake Worth, Fla., a friend of Ramnauth’s. “She wasn’t the kind to drink.”
A toxicology report is being conducted to determine what substances were in Ramnauth’s body at the time of her death.
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Posted in Drinking days, Drugs, Families, Youth, alcohol | Tagged: death, energy drink | 2 Comments »
Posted by fredjoiners on May 18, 2008
Crime Rises with Alcohol Outlet Density
A new Australian study concludes that violence rose in Melbourne communities as the density of alcohol outlets increased, Medical News Today reported.
“The study found that, across Melbourne, the three types of outlets examined — hotel pubs, bars, and packaged bottle shops — all had positive relationships to assault rates,” said study author Michael Livingston of the Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre.
“In other words, increasing the density of these outlets in a suburb leads to increasing rates of violence in that suburb.
When these relationships were explored for specific types of suburbs, it was found that hotels and bars were the biggest drivers of violence in inner-city areas and packaged liquor outlets were more important in suburban areas.”
Every new hotel pub or on-premises liquor license issued in inner-city communities equated to an extra two nighttime assaults each year, the study found. ”
The results of this study don’t really point to particular communities being more at risk than others,” Livingston said. “Instead they suggest that different types of outlets are problematic in different areas.”
Livingston’s study focused on the period 1996 to 2005. “The literature shows that suburbs with more alcohol outlets experience more violence, but only a handful of papers have explored what happens within a suburb as outlet density changes,” he said.
The research will be published in the June 2008 issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
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Posted in Drinking days, Harm Reduction, Research reports, alcohol, men, women | Tagged: alcohol shops, assault, bars, crime, drinking, hotel, outlets, pub, violence | No Comments »
Posted by fredjoiners on May 15, 2008
Men More Likely to Drink for Stress Relief
Depressed men are more likely than women to crave alcohol and develop alcohol-related disorder, according to researchers at Yale University.
CBC News reported May 12 that the study of 54 healthy adult drinkers studied responses to stressful events such as relationship problems and job loss.
“Men’s tendency to crave alcohol when upset may be a learned behavior or may be related to known gender differences in reward pathways in the brain,” said researcher Tara Chaplin. “And this tendency may contribute to risk for alcohol-use disorders.”
The research study was published online in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
From Join Together Online
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Posted in Brain, Drinking days, Emotions, Relapse, Research reports, Stress, alcohol, men, women | Tagged: drink, depressed, crave, Yale, gender | No Comments »
