How much has alcohol been normalized in our society? How embedded does the alcohol normalization go? And what damage has it done to us as a culture and individuals? How much damage has it done to you?

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How’re you doing? I’m Kevin O’Hara for www.alcoholmastery.com

Today I want to talk about: What’s the difference between an active alcoholic and a non-active alcoholic?

I’m holding a stick here. I want you to imagine that this is a scale between one and one hundred up here – and this is the problem scale.

If you were smoking, this is where you start smoking. This is somewhere down the line and it’s probably when you’re smoking a hundred cigarettes a day. This is where you start, smoking one cigarette a day.

I’m sure you’d agree that your problem with cigarette smoking starts here, at number one. As soon as you start smoking, you’ve got a problem. You’d agree wouldn’t you, you know?

It’s the same thing with heroin. As soon as you start taking heroin – right down here at number one – this is when you take your first snort, or you first inject, or whatever it is, but you start down here. This is your first time. This is when you’re really addicted to it and you’ve got a really, really, really, bad problem with it.

But, you have a problem here, as soon as you start with – down here at number one. This is where your problem is going to start. The same with cocaine; the same with magic mushrooms; the same if you were taking arsenic. Your problem would start here at number one.

Now the thing with alcohol is that your problem doesn’t actually start until you get here… or maybe here… or maybe here. All the rest of that is considered to be normal drinking. This is normalised from when we were born and it all depends on what your version of normal is.

Once you start with normal – so, there is no such thing as normal smoking. There is no such thing as normal heroin taking – unless you’re talking about it in a medical capacity: when you’re in hospital and you’re trying to get treated for pain relief and they give you their medical version of heroin.