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Old 11-04-2008   #5 (permalink)
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Re: How addcitive is alcohol?

I can't add anything more than the others have said, but that won't stop me from....

What follows is possibly totally wrong; but is I think close enough to being interesting, based on a distant and moderate education about physiolgy, biochemistry, etc., that... ...welcome any corrections:
Quote:
I think it's interesting that alcohol is one of the 3 psychoactive drugs that don't contain Nitrogen.

Nitrogen is usually part of the active site for most drugs and is linked physiologically to what enables the "standard" addictive mechanism.
This mechanism lends itself to quantification of things like how many "units a day everyday for..." how long would cause addiction. Even that is somewhat variable due to genetics, etc.

Alcohol, however, uses a much different mechanism of addiction and happens to be much more variable across our populations; so it's probably impossible to quantify addictive threshhold dosages, like they do with LD50's.

You'd probably have better results correlating threshhold dosage with personality type (also somewhat genetic) or even with socioeconomic background, than with any one quantity that applied generally to the population.
...and then there's habits vs. addictions. ...telling oneself it's just a bad habit....

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