Should alcoholism be treated as a disease — or a symptom of human weakness?

I MUST take issue with Dr Max Pemberton’s views on alcoholism (Mail). I am 31 years sober and I refer Dr Max to the wealth of medical opinion and scientific research that addiction is an illness. U.S. findings in the Sixties established that those of us who become addicted seem to metabolise alcohol in a different way. When I first took a drink as a teenager, it was not my intention to become addicted. However, unknown to me at that time, I switched on some part of my brain that revelled in alcohol. I enjoyed the effect. By the time I was 40, I was unable to stop without help. Once I had received that help, it was up to me to find out how to stay that way. It came through Alcoholics Anonymous, where I learned how to become contented to stay off alcohol. I know that should it enter my body again, I will pick up from where I stopped and quickly progress further down the scale.

Alcoholism is a chronic, progressive and fatal disease that is treatable, but not curable. Naming it as a disease helped me enormously. Relapsing is another part of the addiction and this frustrates people attempting to help, as it is difficult for someone who will never become addicted to understand why it is so difficult to stay clean. I trained as an addiction counsellor and spent 11 years working in residential treatment. Every so often I come across a former patient at an AA meeting, so I know the treatment works. Is Dr Max claiming all the work carried out over nearly 100 years is wrong? Whether it is alcohol, drugs, sex, exercise or food, addiction is a disease that needs appropriate treatment. MICHAEL SPROULE,

Aldershot, Hants. BILL WILSON, the man who started Alcoholics Anonymous, was successful and hard- working, but felt the need to go out drinking every evening. He regretted how it made him feel afterwards and the pain it caused his wife, but he was drinking with men similar to himself and so convinced himself he had a ‘problem’. He persuaded health professionals he had a ‘disease’. AA has been an extremely successful rehab programme for tens of thousands of people, but the notion they have a disease means the stigma attached to their drinking is lifted: it is not their fault they get drunk every day. And people give them sympathy. Dr Max Pemberton is absolutely right. Alcoholism is not a disease and should never be treated as if it is. Human beings can be very weak. Walk into any hospital and there will be beds taken up by people withdrawing from alcohol addiction. The NHS is being bled dry by this, which is a sad state of affairs. DAVID PATRICK MOORE,

London SE23.