Dear

Thanks for subscribing to Partners which will now become a regular publication. It will contain some discussions of issues surrounding living with an alcoholic or a heavy drinker.

Appeal for Help

I am in the process of building a brand new website with the intention of providing tools for problem drinkers. As part of that site I am looking for people to interview, probably by phone. The people I am looking for should either have had an alcohol problem themselves and have now recovered or have lived with or are living with someone with an alcohol problem. If you are in either of these categories and are interested in being interviewed please get in touch at the link below. Alternately if you know someone who fits either of these categories and would be interested in being interviewed give them the link address. Thanks.

Left hand, right hand non-communication

One frequently suggested solution to the rising problems with alcohol is to encourage people to drink low alcohol drinks. This seems an eminently sensible policy as it does not appear to be in the mould of the usual killjoy attitude “Thou should not drink”. Instead it recognises that people want to have a drink and enjoy themselves but do not necessarily want to get wasted. So governments should be encouraging the practice – well actually no!

The Wine and Spirit Trade Association are in favour of this initiative and have carried out a survey that shows low alcohol wines are becoming more popular. Nevertheless a wine producer is being prevented from selling its low alcohol wine in the UK. So what is the problem? It seems, according to the Food Standards Agency, that the process used to reduce the alcohol content, Reverse Osmosis, is not currently licensed in Europe and so they will not allow this wine to be sold in the UK. The same wine however is being sold in Germany, Switzerland, Holland and other countries and US wine, using the exact same process, can be sold in the UK – bureaucracy (a substitute for common sense) will kill us one day.

Drinking is good for you?

A study from Italy followed people with mild cognitive impairment (a transitional stage between ageing and dementia). What it found was that those who drank up to one glass of wine a day were 85% less likely to develop dementia. The scientists do not know why alcohol has this effect but have speculated that a small to moderate amount of alcohol may have a beneficial effect on the blood vessels in the brain. No benefit was found in subjects who drank more than one glass of wine.

Another study carried out in Boston found that drinking one drink a day is associated with reduced risk of renal cancer in both men and women. However, since drinking is also associated with increased risk of cancers of mouth and oesophagus, breast and colon, the researchers suggest that other preventative methods are probably safer.

Drunken Monkeys

A new study has provided more support for a genetic contribution for heavy drinking. The researchers found evidence that a neuro-receptor in the brain (118G, mu-opioid receptor) was probably responsible for transmitting the positive effects of alcohol. Indeed people who have this particular variant of the receptor report heightened effects of alcohol.

The study gave groups of monkeys access to alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks for one hour per day over a period of six weeks. Measures showed that the animals with the 118G receptor had a greater effect from alcohol and consumed about twice as much as the other animals. Although this does show a possible genetic predisposition to alcohol abuse that is all it shows. We need to remember that in humans there are many other factors that also have an effect.

A New Classification of Drugs

A recent paper published in the Lancet suggested a new ranking of drugs. The authors argue that drugs should be ranked according to the harm they do rather than on the current arbitrary legal status. When they classified them in this way Heroin and Cocaine topped the list but were closely followed by street methadone and then alcohol. These were followed by amphetamines, benzodiazepines and tobacco with cannabis, LSD and ecstasy far behind. There remains some argument about cannabis as there is still some debate about the link between cannabis and psychosis.