ALCOHOL 

Beer, wine and hard liquors are available to anyone over eighteen. While liquor never acquired quite the glamour of tobacco, it has long been a fixture in the entertainment world. And college fraternities have become notorious for their beer bashes for new members.

Initiation rites have sought to get new members dead drunk. There have been a few deaths reported from the excess of beer or alcohol consumed. Colleges are now starting to frown on this practice and to put a stop to it.

Individuals vary in their reaction to alcohol. Most people can take it or leave it. 

But for a percentage of people, alcohol is addictive like tobacco or cocaine. Once they have started to drink, a craving develops. There is an insistent need and desire for alcohol. And the human system does not register enough. It wants more and more. The need incapacitates a people. They become unable to hold a job. Their liver starts to deteriorate.

Then they can go into treatment. For some people treatment seems to work. But for others, the addiction will not go away. Until recently I always believed that treatment was effective, and would free people from the addiction. But then we had the experience of one who had become addicted coming to live with us. He searched on the net and found that there were numbers of AA groups around.

It turns out that while the 12 steps may work, for many alcoholics, the meetings seem to be necessary for a lifetime. The man connected with the AA groups and social workers. It turns out that he is required to go a meeting every day in the week. And this does not have a cut off or ending point.

In other words for some people who become addicted, they have to commit themselves to a lifetime of AA meetings, one every day in the week. So if you happen to be one of the people whom alcohol addicts, the addiction appears to be something like AIDS, it has no real cure. Is can saddle you with a life time of every day nightly meting to keep your addiction under control.