[luckyjimm]

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I was a past alcoholic (which I have long since beaten, I can now drink socially without problems).

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No. You are still an alcoholic till the day you die or you never were to begin with. You never "beat" alcoholism, especially since you still drink. For a alcoholic there's no such thing as "social" drinking, it's just drinking. And yes this is from personal experience.

Still a very sobering cautionary story. Would make a good tv show.

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This is an interesting issue. I was an alcoholic. Got full marks on the twenty questions. I drank to blackout; drank on my own; spent a few nights rough when I drank so much I couldn't get home; vomited my guts up and endured incredibly painful hangover countless times; put myself through so much social disgrace. I finally got myself to AA aged 25, went to meetings for six months, was sober a total of 22 months. But when I started drinking again, it didn't progress like they told me it would in AA. I just wasn't interested in booze any more. It wouldn't happen any more that I'd drink and not be able to stop. I wouldn't turn to booze as an escape.

Two things had changed. First, my social life wasn't so good, so I didn't have so many opportunities to drink, and I didn't look for them. But, mostly, while "sober" I had become a compulsive gambler. I was more interested in playing poker than getting drunk. It's now two years since I started drinking again, and I can count on one hand the number of times I did embarrassing things while drunk since then, and there haven't been times I've blacked out etc. Both the quantity and frequency of my drinking is now much, much less. Weeks pass without me having a drink now. I just lost interest in booze. Of course, I'm still an addict. Alcoholism is best looked at as a symptom of something else, a wider problem of being an addict, and so it's perfectly possible for an ex-alcoholic to be able to drink normally while he pursues another addiction.