Crossing the Line from Social Drinker to Alcohol Abuser

 How much alcohol is too much? If you have one drink per day, with a few extra on the weekend, you’d be racking up at least 10 drinks per week. If you added up all the drinks you have in one month, you might be surprised at the amount. But is it too much?

“I think everybody downplays it,” said Dr. Timothy Irvine, a family physician with Houston Northwest Medical Center. “The actual numbers aren't as important as what you're doing with those numbers,” Irvine said. “It's not a problem if it's not causing issues. But the person who has to stop everything to have that one drink a day? That would indicate some dependency. There's really no clear-cut answer.”

Kim Morgan of the Houston Chronicle suggests that readers think of this as the happy hour gray zone—the time of day when people indulge in an alcohol beverage.

“Comparing someone who has seven glasses a week to an alcoholic would be like comparing their own height to the elevation of Mount Everest,” said a man from Alcoholics Anonymous Houston. “For me, I didn't drink just to take the edge off, I drank to get drunk. I wanted to escape, not just relax. That's a major difference.”

When asked if there was anything wrong with looking forward to a drink, the man said, “Not really. Have you ever said, ‘I've had a very long day, I'm looking forward to a glass of wine'? That's very normal behavior. An alcoholic eats, sleeps, and dreams of being drunk, beginning at seven in the morning.”

There is a path, though, from social drinker to alcoholic—alcohol abuse. “It's very common to hear an alcohol abuser say they have a drink or two to unwind, relax or to take the edge off,” said Lois Thomson-Bowersock, a Texas board- and internationally certified alcohol and drug counselor in The Woodlands.

Alcoholism, she said, is both nature and nurture. When doing things like turning to liquor to bolster your confidence for one reason or another or engaging in trigger drinking—when any event has you reaching for a drink—it is nurture.

If alcohol addiction is in your family, it’s nature. If one parent or grandparent was an alcoholic, you are five times more likely to develop problems with alcohol. If both of your parents or grandparents were addicted, you're 10 times more likely to develop an addiction, Thomson-Bowersock said.

But whether you're having one drink a day or 10 a day, Thomson-Bowersock said the general rule of thumb is that you wouldn't be asking if you didn't have a problem.

If you're simply wondering, you could try going dry during happy hour. A good test, Thomson-Bowersock said, is to see how long you can go without alcohol.