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This is beer heaven. You know, the place where everyone is slim, sexy, happy and full of life.

Now back to reality. This is beer hell.

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Alcohol did NOT play a role in this incident. How often do you hear that statement!

Running errands in town this weekend I watched a tire actually just give out and go flat on the car ahead of me in the turning lane. When able, I often will assist stranded motorists but what I saw get out of this vehicle dispelled any thoughts of being a Good Samaritan.

Exiting simultaneously from their respective sides were a man and a woman already in an argument that was probably just going to get worse with their now dead-in-the-water status. The woman was talking out of the side of her mouth so as not to displace her cigarette, and in less than the minute or so it took traffic to slow enough for me to move past and turn the pot-bellied guy had already taken off his shirt.

Odds are that one of these two or both has an addiction, click "Read more" to continue...

Authorities seized over $200 million in a single raid from a Mexican meth ring in 2007. I was sent this picture of the money stacked up, it weighed over two tons, but decided not to write up a post because of the age of the story. That’s a lot of money though and I’ve had a hard time shaking the image out of my thoughts. It is easy to focus scrutiny on the immediate and obvious damage of drug and alcohol abuse; overdose, crime, neglect/abuse, infidelity and violence, but rare is the mention of what these things have cancelled out.

What if the wife wasn’t a meth widow? What if the son wasn’t abused and grew up in a healthy environment? It’s downright depressing to think about what good could have come out of this $200 million dollars if it hadn’t been squandered on drugs.

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Congress passed the Addiction and Mental Health Parity Legislation assuring that at least one good thing will come out of the massive bank bailout plan that has been making international headlines this week. While I am pleased to see this progress made, it bothers me that an issue that affects nearly half of all Americans in some manner had to be snuck in as an earmark bundled in with more “critical” legislation. Congress has turned into a sea of abuse where power and partisanship is the drug of choice; I always try to keep TDA apolitical but I am depressed that this legislation had been held up until now and passed for all the wrong reasons.

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I have a hard time believing that this video was considered a good idea even in the age of leisure suits and disco. The same could be said about the maladaptive and contradictory behavior of a codependent, a good example being this letter to an advice column.

Every six months or so, he comes to my house drunk and raises Cain in front of the kids… He never says he's sorry and it causes fights that could be avoided if he just wouldn't drink… If I try to make him leave, he does more in front of the kids, and he has been known to hit. How can I make it clear to him I've had enough… I have called the law before and that just makes matters worse.

I know it's easy to criticize, but that's sort of my point.

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While the last two are very relative to the TDA theme, I thought it might be fun to fill out the list a little bit more on unique ways to get fired from driving the school bus.

• Be convicted of PWD, practicing witchcraft while driving.
• Salute the President.
• Drive while out of uniform… and clothes.
• Make an illegal U-turn (while shooting up cocaine).
• Pass out drunk in middle of road with a full load of students.

There's probably a hundred different recovery topics that I could tee off on from this last story, but I'll stick with the simple one; alcoholism may not be contagious, but it can be deadly to those innocents who get exposed to it.

It is a well known fact that alcohol abuse can cause or accelerate dementia, but there doesn’t seem to be any conclusive evidence that links alcoholism and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) even though the two are associated with similar physical changes in the brain.

This statement becomes a matter for debate although in a reverse fashion when considering the following request for advice that popped up on my news feed from an AD forum website.

Recovering alcoholic (many years sober) is forgetting recovery and drinking? Need advice.HealthCentral

I think in this case one could argue that AD, while there may not be a cause and effect link to alcoholism, definitely could become a contributing factor in relapse.

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"I've lamented his death every second since he died and will live with it the rest of my life." So says Gary Neal referring to Harrison, his seventeen year-old son, who died of an overdose while abusing prescription painkillers.

With the second anniversary of Harrison Neal's death approaching, his father still has a lot of questions and doubts. "Could I have done it better? Could I have done it different? Would the results have been different? You never know the answers to those questions because you never get a second chance. ~ CNN

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While proponents of supervised underage drinking such as the Amethyst Initiative and Dr. Stanton Peele often point toward Europe as an example of how relatively lower age limits for drinking alcohol have been successful, new information is coming out that alcohol consumption by the young regardless of method will sharply increase the risk of alcohol dependency later in life may be swaying opinion in the opposite direction across the big pond.

A new study by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism NIAAA suggests that any alcohol consumption by teenagers is a risk within itself regardless if it is properly supervised or culturally permissible. From the Timesonline, “We can see for the first time the association between an early ‘age of first drink’ and an increased risk of alcohol use disorders that persists into adulthood,” said Deborah Dawson, a research scientist at the NIAAA.

The study has many rethinking the policy of serving watered down wine to children in France and Southern Europe to teach responsible drinking. What good is this practice if it is jeapordizing a set percentage, those that will now be at a much higher risk of developing alcoholism? Over the last 20 years much of Europe has seen a spike in binge drinking and youth alcohol abuse fueled by unlimited media access and popular culture. This has been largely ignored by those in the US who often cite Europe as a model for moderate drinking.

So it seems to me that arguing over lowering the drinking age in the States for any reason is counterproductive. When it comes to young people and drinking we have been aiming at the wrong target; it shouldn’t be when, but why and how do we stop it?

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