I don't think of it as an illness.  For one thing, it is not contagious. It is not something like leukemia or lupus or any of the other "real" diseases.  There are real, major distinctions to be made between the two phenomena.

Q. So, in that case, there has been research done that shows that alcoholism, in particular, can be familial.  Studies have been done where I think they studied so many men only who were children of alcoholic parents but were not raised by the biological parent. They were actually raised by the adopted parent in an environment other than the home of the biological parent and, yet, these studies have shown that almost every one of these men showed alcoholism traits.  Do you feel that there is something to this familial theory?

A. I haven't seen the research so I can't comment on those specific research findings.  My guess is there probably is something to it although maybe not what people make of it. There are frequently any number of ways of interpreting the same set of data.  It may well be that there are genetic predispositions.  For example, I understand that American Indians tend to have a great deal less tolerance for using alcohol because they do not have a genetic tolerance for alcohol. American Indian's use of alcohol doesn't go back any more than about 400 years.  Whereas, in Europe and Asia, people have been using alcohol for millennia and they have actually had a chance to develop a genetic tolerance to the poisoning.  Alcohol is actually a poison and the drug affects are due to the body responding to it as a poison.  I would guess that the whole thing about familial and genetic predisposition has something to it.  The important thing to notice is that even with the predisposition, somebody doesn't have to have an alcohol or drug problem.  Unless we have a case like a cocaine baby, nobody is born addicted to anything.  I don't know enough about that research per se to make an argument one way or the other about it.