A Landmark Study on the Origins of Alcoholism

North Shore AA is infamous for the cornucopia of available meetings. You can’t spit without hitting a meeting at any given time during the day. It can be confusing, frustrating, and a life saver depending on where you’re at and what’s going on in that little head of yours. One group in particular, The Peabody Group, has been the subject of controversy around the area. They are referred to as the “chemically shortchanged” group or “chemies.” The chemies “believe” that they were born predisposed to drinking and drugging alcoholically and that the culprit is to a large degree physical.

According to the best online description I’ve been able to find on a tiny little website with a single article titled, “Facts about Alcoholism,” it goes something like this:

“Alcoholism is a ‘Physical’ disease first. It is caused by a physical abnormality in one’s body. This is separate from the ‘physical symptoms’ which we will discuss . For years I have watched research looking everywhere but the right place for the answers to alcoholism. It has been frustrating and baffling. Many years ago the cause was found through medical research.”

As the story goes there was a guy by the name of Jack Brennan, who’s sponsor was Sam Cohen who was sponsored by Bill Wilson himself, one of the founders of AA.

Here’s a little more from the same blog post:

In my first year of recovery I was blessed to be introduced to a man named Jack Brennan and a group of alcoholics of the sickest variety on the North Shore of Boston, Ma.. Jack had gotten sober for good in 1944. His sponsor was a man named Sam Cohen whose sponsor was Bill Wilson. Jack was also fortunate to have been treated by a Dr. Smith, a biochemist from Belleview hospital,. Dr. Smith was doing research on alcoholics. He had found that in alcoholics the Adrenal Gland malfunctioned. Adrenaline and epinephrine ,was seeping into the bloodstream and the calming chemical was missing or the mechanism to deliver it to the bloodstream was damaged. Dr Smith told Jack that this was the cause of all his symptoms active and also when he tried to stop drinking. He explained to him just how he was affected. To prove this he gave Jack a shot of what his body was missing. Jack says,; That he experienced a miracle. This encounter is detailed in the pamphlet that Jack wrote “One Solitary Voice”. I would highly recommend reading what he says of his experiences. I had identification in depth with his story . It made sense to Jack, and makes sense to me, that the disease of alcoholism is centered in the adrenal glands. It all starts there.

Let us begin by looking at the symptoms associated with THE DISEASE OF ALCOHOLISM. An active alcoholic cannot control their drinking. Alcoholics over-indulge at the most inopportune times. Drinking to excess he/she may lose jobs, blow important opportunities, be irresponsible with children and family, and have trouble with the law among other things. Everyone associated with this person is at the least exasperated and befuddled by this behavior. Does he/she have no will power? Are they lacking in character? Meanwhile, the one afflicted with this Disease is even more distressed by their actions. No one would want to live this way. The alcoholic has no idea why he/she is the way they are. Guilt, shame, remorse, self-hate internalized or projected on the world is the alcoholics lot. Yet he/she must always defend their right to drink or use. This is what Alcoholism demands until death.

Today we know that when an alcoholic takes one drink of alcohol or takes any other mood /mind altering drug it triggers a physical compulsion and mental obsession to continue using that is uncontrollable by the unaided will. Will power is of no use. There are a variety of patterns of drinking that an alcoholic may go through and it is certain the progression will be fatal unless help intervenes.

Dr. Smith explained to Jack that when he took a drink his abnormal body substituted the drug alcohol for the chemical that he lacked to relieve the tension caused by the adrenaline and epinephrine that was constant in his bloodstream. Unfortunately the calming effect is short lived and the body reacts against the foreign substance by triggering more of the ”alert” chemicals, adrenaline and epinephrine. The body calls for more of what had calmed it, and the cycle goes on. This is the physical compulsion. The old Chinese Proverb states,” The man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, the drink takes the man. “ What Jack and all alcoholics are experiencing is the Physical Compulsion associated with Alcoholism. Along with the body, the mind of the alcoholic is also affected. This chemical condition causes the alcoholic mind to be more and more obsessed with drinking or using whatever drug is choice. This obsession may be conscious or subtle affecting every decision he/she makes in life. Everyone and everything will take a back seat in importance as Alcoholism takes over the alcoholic. It is a sad and devastating situation for the alcoholic and everyone associated with him/her, family, friends and society.

Theoretically that could make sense. It did for me. It resonated. But every time I would ask about proof or evidence of this theory the response was usually something along the lines of, “well, it’s not like I have a lab here in my kitchen.”

It struck me as odd that in the nearly 75 years since 1944 not a single member of this group had ever been tested and had thus accepted this purely on faith.

The other day a friend sent me an article from the Atlantic titled, “A Landmark Study on the Origins of Alcoholism,” in which well respected science writer, Ed Yong, describes some interesting stuff going on at the National Institute of Health (NIH).

Yong writes:

The amygdala is an almond-shaped region that sits deep within the brain, and is heavily involved in processing emotions. When Augier looked at the amygdala of alcoholic rats, he found signs of unusually low activity in several genes, all of which are linked to a chemical called GABA.

GABA is a molecular red light: Certain neurons make and release it to stop their neighbors from firing. Once that’s done, the GABA-making neurons use an enzyme called GAT3 to pump the molecule back into themselves, so they can reuse it. But in the amygdala of alcohol-preferring rats, the gene that makes GAT3 is much less active, and makes just half the usual levels of the pump. GABA accumulates around the neighboring neurons, making them abnormally inactive.

The consequences of this are unclear, but Heilig thinks that all this extra GABA hampers the rats’ ability to deal with fear and stress. They are naturally more anxious, which might explain their vulnerability to alcohol. He predicts it will take another five years of work to fully close this loop. But for now, his team have definitely shown that GAT3—the GABA-recycling pump—is important. They took rats that prefer sugar and deliberately reduced the levels of GAT3 in their amygdala. This simple procedure was enough to convert those resilient rodents into addiction-prone, alcohol-preferring 15-percenters.

At this point, the team submitted their result to a journal, which agreed to publish them. Good news—but after Heilig’s long history with rat-shaped dead-ends, he wanted to do one more experiment. “Curing alcoholism in rats is not important,” he says. “What’s important is what this looks like in humans with alcohol addiction.”
As it happens, it looks much the same. Heilig’s colleagues examined postmortem tissue samples from people who had donated their brains to research, some of whom had alcohol addiction. As in the rats, they found nothing unusual in five of six brain regions. But in the amygdala, they found low levels of GAT3.

I invite you to read both of these pieces in their entirety and form your own conclusion, but it would appear that the Peabody Group was not entirely wrong and only missed the mark by about eighteen inches from brain to gland. Considering the science that was available at the time, that's not too bad.

Facts about Alcoholism
A Landmark Study on the Origins of Alcoholism