By
Andrew Stackpool
PROFESSOR
Emeritus Nick Heather came to Australia to address the Alcohol
and Drug Management section of the ADF’s inaugural Mental Health
Conference and went away impressed with the organisation’s progress.
“I am most impressed with the ADF program, it is first class,”
he said. “I am delighted to see it reflects international current
thinking and is as good as one can get.”
Professor Heather told the conference there were few alcoholics
in society, “but a huge percentage of the population who are heavy
drinkers”.
“Alcohol-related risk and harm is widespread in modern society.
In the UK, 22.5 per cent of the male population (about 9 million
people) are drinking at risk levels but are not alcoholics,” he
said.
He said the concept of alcoholism as a disease was “on the way
out”.
“There has been a gradual shift over the past 20 to 30 years which
has seen alcohol problems no longer viewed as a pure medically-treated
disease,” he said.
Professor Heather stressed that this was not a return to blaming
people or punishing them, it was not to deny that a large part
of problem drinking stemmed from alcoholic dependence, nor was
it disputed that genetic factors and social factors played a role
in the development of alcohol-related problems.
“In many ways we have returned to a very early 19th Century concept
that the perspective of alcohol problems reside in the bottle,
not in the man. The recent view that there was an ‘alcoholism’
gene – meaning a fault with the person – is now shifting back
to the view that what is in the bottle is damaging, addictive
and toxic,” he said.
“This previous view gave a distorted view that very few of us
were at risk from alcohol and the rest of us could carry on drinking
to our hearts’ content. It wasn’t ‘cool’ to criticise alcohol
for fear of being branded a ‘wowser’.
“Now, we are saying, we are all at risk, but drinking in moderation,
and in accordance with the internationally recognised standards,
is OK. Alcoholrelated harm extends beyond dependence; you can
have organic disease without addiction, while its treatment must
extend beyond the clinic.”
