Page 54 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

MORE ABOUT ALCOHOLISM 33
money could buy was at his disposal. Every attempt
failed. Though a robust man at retirement, he went
to pieces quickly and was dead within four years.
This case contains a powerful lesson. Most of us
have believed that if we remained sober for a long
stretch, we could thereafter drink normally. But here
is a man who at fifty-five years found he was just
where he had left off at thirty. We have seen the truth
demonstrated again and again: “Once an alcoholic, al-
ways an alcoholic.’’ Commencing to drink after a
period of sobriety, we are in a short time as bad as
ever. If we are planning to stop drinking, there must
be no reservation of any kind, nor any lurking notion
that someday we will be immune to alcohol.
Young people may be encouraged by this man’s ex-
perience to think that they can stop, as he did, on
their own will power. We doubt if many of them can
do it, because none will really want to stop, and hardly
one of them, because of the peculiar mental twist al-
ready acquired, will find he can win out. Several of
our crowd, men of thirty or less, had been drinking
only a few years, but they found themselves as help-
less as those who had been drinking twenty years.
To be gravely affected, one does not necessarily
have to drink a long time nor take the quantities
some of us have. This is particularly true of women.
Potential female alcoholics often turn into the real
thing and are gone beyond recall in a few years.
Certain drinkers, who would be greatly insulted if
called alcoholics, are astonished at their inability to
stop. We, who are familiar with the symptoms, see
large numbers of potential alcoholics among young