Kick the Drink Easily! Page 5
The problem is the way the drug is perceived in the addict’s mind.
I’m not saying that some alcohol addicts or people who drink heavily from morning till night don’t experience a degree of withdrawal. In fact, for some, their sugar levels are so shot and their body so starved of nutrients that, yes, they do indeed suffer physically when the supply of this liquid drug is suddenly cut off. But even in the most severe cases the sugar levels and nutrients can easily be replaced with some delicious freshly extracted raw juice and super fruit smoothies. However, for the vast majority reading this book, there just isn’t any withdrawal worth taking about. I mean, exactly what physical withdrawal are we talking about here? Where exactly will it hurt? What does it amount to really? A hangover? How long does that last? A headache for a couple of days? We have all had our fair share of those and we have all got over them too. The drinker who has reached the stage where he has lost his home, job and family, all for the precious nectar, will not have endured all that heartache because they are afraid of a hangover.
The fear for most drinkers is that they will not enjoy or cope with their lives in the same way without alcohol. The only thing that keeps people hooked is the illusion created by the drug itself and the years of conditioning and brainwashing. That is why I am so excited about sharing this information with you. It is what makes this approach to stopping so easy and enjoyable. Drinkers are only hooked on what they have been brainwashed to believe alcohol does for them. The chemical effect of alcohol creates the illusions which seem to confirm all this brainwashing. All we have to do is remove the brainwashing, then the addiction is automatically removed.
I am fully aware that if you have tried for years to break free and found it difficult, then accepting what I am saying at this stage may be hard. I am not asking you just to agree with everything I am saying. I want you to be sceptical and to question not only your own views on alcohol but, more importantly, what society has led you to believe. I am also fully aware that there will be a number of people reading this who have never really considered stopping and perhaps believe they are not hooked. It really doesn’t matter which category you fall into as, providing you open your mind, this book will change forever the way you look and think about the drug called alcohol.
So if the addiction is over 90 per cent psychological and only about 10 per cent physical then, in order to break free, all we need to do is remove the brainwashing and make sure you have some live nutrients flowing through your system during the first week or so to help with any ‘hangover’ from the addiction. Information about live nutrients can be found on my website, www.juicemaster.com
We need to understand, not why people shouldn’t drink alcohol because we are all fully aware of that, but the real question which is …
Why Do People Drink Alcohol?
The answer is that we have been conditioned to drink alcohol from a very early age. Because of the illusion alcohol creates, people believe that there are genuine benefits to drinking and the sad reality is that it is so much a part of our identity as a nation. Somehow we have reached the stage where it is the only drug on the planet that, if you don’t take it, people think you must either be suffering from a mythical disease known as alcoholism, are driving or are some kind of freak.
If you stop smoking you are a hero, if you come off heroin you are congratulated on your achievement but so strong is the alcohol indoctrination that, if you stop drinking, people think you need medical assistance for the rest of your life. Why?
It may be because around 80 per cent of the population is being conned by the same delusions and feel dependent on them. They know that just the thought of never drinking again instils such fear that they are convinced that stopping for good means suffering forever.
Alcohol really has everyone fooled. The brainwashing is so severe that it would be hard not to get hooked on alcohol because of the social pressure that exists to get you hooked in the first place. Almost from the moment we are born we are bombarded with information telling us that alcohol not only makes you an adult but portraying drinkers as heroes and heroines. The strong are made stronger and the weak are suddenly transformed into courageous and confident people because they drink. I don’t suppose a single youngster, after seeing a tramp drinking lighter fuel first thing in the morning or watching somebody getting loud, argumentative, aggressive, abusive, nasty, violent, overemotional, obnoxious, stupid or slumped over the toilet vomiting, has ever been remotely tempted to try their first alcoholic drink. Why not? After all, this is the reality of alcohol but why should we be expected to relate to this side of it when we are constantly being bombarded with the other, glamorous images of drinking? These show young, strong, wealthy, successful and attractive people, from film and pop stars to successful businessmen and women, having a good time drinking. Doctors, lawyers, friends, family, partners, in fact everyone, it seems, is constantly telling us that drink equals a good time. We even have doctors telling us that alcohol is good for you, a point I shall cover later.
We have been conditioned to believe that any form of celebration must involve alcohol; otherwise it is just not a celebration. Christmas, New Year, birthdays and christenings (‘let’s wet the baby’s head’), weddings, holidays, weekends, competition wins, new jobs, pay rises and engagements. Let’s drink to this, let’s drink to that; in fact, let’s drink to anything just as long as we drink.
Every year, £200 million alone is spent on advertising alcohol in the UK. The government earns over £8.7 billion a year from alcohol and there’s another contradiction. The last government earned this at the same time as they increased the drinking hours and condemned drinking. How perverse is that? As a nation we spend nearly £25 billion on alcohol per year, almost as much as the entire UK education budget of £27 billion which, in itself, represents 13 per cent of the total public expenditure for 2009.
It seems strange that society is often very judgemental when it comes to other forms of drug addiction; forms of drug addiction that they are fortunate enough not to be addicted to! Before I understood fully the nature of drug addiction I would often be the first in line to judge drug addicts. I wasn’t a drug addict myself, after all I only smoked and drank alcohol; it wasn’t as if I was on heroin or anything silly. It wasn’t like I was on heavy drugs, or so I thought.
Society in general is always getting on its high horse about other forms of drug addiction. People often call for life sentences for heroin pushers or ecstasy dealers. I am not saying that this is wrong, nor am i condoning other drugs, but alcohol kills more people every year than heroin, crack, cocaine, speed, ecstasy, in fact all other hard drugs combined. Whereas ‘hard’ drugs kill about 1,000 people a year in the UK, alcohol kills over 9,000. Yes, you read correctly, over twenty-four people die each day of alcohol abuse in the UK alone and that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are also the alcohol related deaths which are estimated by the Royal College of Physicians to be around 40,000 a year and rising. What is more, this costs the NHS £2.7 billion a year in treatment.
It is common to see people sitting with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other saying ‘look at the youth of today on all these drugs’ but do you know the name Leah Betts? You probably do. She is the poor girl who died of the drug ecstasy. Her picture was on huge billboards all over the country to highlight the dangers of that drug. Every TV station, radio programme and newspaper carried the story for months, some for years. There was an outcry calling for something to be done, to look at what the youth of today are on and to try the person who sold her the drug for murder. In which case, perhaps our government, along with the alcohol industry, should be tried for murder for the alcohol abuse and alcohol related deaths the drug has caused. After all, they are taking the biggest share of the profit from this legalised form of drug pushing aren’t they? It is difficult to calculate the exact number of people killed by the effects of alcohol, particularly as many families ask doctors to leave out alcohol as the cause of death on the dea
th certificate of a loved one.
There are so many people affected by alcohol in so many different ways. These include victims of sexual crime, physical and mental abuse, unwanted pregnancies, violence, family break-ups, the 75 per cent of stabbings directly attributable to alcohol, suicides, murders, rapes, beatings. There are between eight and fourteen million working days lost each year in the UK due to hangovers and alcohol is so often responsible for poverty and homelessness. I could fill a whole book with the death and destruction caused by alcohol and that is without the mental and physical abuse which alcohol inflicts on its victims. But that is not what this book is all about and, more importantly, it would not help the drinker to stop drinking. It might open their eyes a little more but they would still suffer from mental deprivation if they stopped. Drinkers already know these facts and, like all drug addicts, choose to block them from their minds.
The reason I mention these facts and figures is to illustrate once again that there is only one thing that keeps anybody addicted to alcohol and that is fear. There is the fear that we will not be able to enjoy or cope with our lives without a drink, the fear that we will have to go through some awful trauma in order to break free or, perhaps the worst fear of all, that we can never break free. But where did these fears come from? Who or what created them? Are they a part of our genetic make-up, character or personality? Are the fears there because we are weak willed? No, no, no. As I stated at the start of the book, it is the drug itself that creates the fear and all the brainwashing perpetuates and compounds it. As I will repeatedly emphasise, people are not so much hooked on the alcohol itself but what they have been brainwashed to believe it does for them. Think about it. The fears were not there before you started drinking were they?
Before you started drinking you could enjoy social gatherings without alcohol and you were perfectly happy. Now I am not saying that you were living a stress-free life before you started drinking. In fact, the most stressful period of many people’s lives tends to be early childhood and adolescence. But when you were stressed as a child your first thought wasn’t to fix yourself a drink to calm yourself down after a hard day at the nursery was it? When you went to jelly and ice cream parties you didn’t need drink to enjoy yourself or to remove your inhibitions. In other words you were able to enjoy and cope with life without drinking alcohol. So why did you have that first drink? The answer is simple. It was because of all the pressure.
We end up believing all the nonsense about alcohol; all the advertising and brainwashing that makes you think you are not really an adult until you try your first drink. Our friends are doing it, our family does it, our film and TV heroes do it, so it is inevitable that we are going to have our first alcoholic drink. Unlike smoking or other drugs, we are not even told that alcohol is dangerous or addictive. Alcohol is the only drug known to kill over 160 people a week in the UK. We are even encouraged by our parents to drink alcohol. If you ask a smoker, ‘Would you encourage your children to smoke?’ the answer will be a clear, ‘No way!’ However, so strong is the brainwashing with alcohol that the same question to a drinker may result in a less clear-cut answer. Many parents give their children their first taste of alcohol before they have reached double figures. It is often a little glass of wine with a meal or a sip of beer from Dad’s can. My grandmother even bought me a hipflask inscribed with my initials for my sixteenth birthday. Alcohol is so much the ‘norm’ that it is a mystery how some people do not get hooked, not why they do. Is it any wonder that over 90 per cent of our male and 56 per cent of the female population drinks alcohol and even that is growing in the case of women?
Once we begin to realise that we are hooked on alcohol and that the physical addiction is easy to overcome, why do we find it so hard to quit? It’s because we believe that we are making a genuine sacrifice and are actually ‘giving up’ something worth having. We feel mentally deprived when we stop. This feeling of deprivation is the real problem because even if you do not drink for years, but believe that you have ‘given up’ a genuine pleasure, then the feeling of deprivation and misery will last the rest of your life. That is why there are some people still going to AA for years after they have stopped drinking; miserable people still pining for a drink. That is why they are taking one day at a time. It is because they all feel as though they are missing out. They still feel deprived.
Who wants to go through life fighting a desire to drink or feeling miserable and deprived? The good news is that you won’t have to. Once you understand fully why you drink and you begin to realise that alcohol does absolutely nothing for you then, for the first time in your life, you will start to realise that you will be giving up nothing and, for that reason, you will not feel deprived when you stop. You will not have to fight a desire; you will simply feel elated because you don’t have to do it ever again.
SO WHAT DOES ALCOHOL GENUINELY DO FOR YOU ANYWAY – WHY DO PEOPLE DRINK?
It is possible to understand why we tried our first drink. It was because of all the indoctrination and pressure put on us, but what makes people have the second, third, fourth and hundreds of thousands of drinks after that? There are three main reasons why people drink alcohol. It’s either for the pleasure (whatever the addict perceives that to be), because it’s a crutch (stress reliever, relaxant, etc.) or because they believe that drinking has simply become a habit. There are a few drinkers who believe that the only reason they drink is because it has become a habit but I would like to lay this misconception to rest right now. People do not drink alcohol simply because …
It’s a Habit
I must admit that I used to believe I was drinking certain drinks simply out of habit. Not all of them of course; some were for pleasure and some to help cope with stress, but I honestly thought that some of my drinking was due to habit. But who was I kidding? Habit? The reasons we come up with to justify our drinking are amazing. Did I really think I left my house, went to the off-licence, came home, opened the bottle and drank it all out of habit? I do understand that we can all get into the routine of doing certain things, but it’s easy to break other routines. For example, we drive on the left-hand side of the road in this country but when we go abroad, we switch to the right with no real problem. Some heroin addicts fool themselves into believing that they are injecting themselves through sheer habit as well. It’s even referred to as a ‘heroin habit’ but anybody on the outside can see that it is pure drug addiction. If it were only habit they could just inject themselves with a syringe full of water. It would save them a fortune. If it were just a habit people could simply stop doing it.
Do you believe that people who lose their homes, family, self-respect, dignity, pride, self-worth and sometimes even their lives as a result of alcohol do so because they couldn’t break a habit? Of course not; they do so because it’s a drug addiction like any other. If you still think that some people are drinking out of habit, why is it that people who haven’t had a drink in years are still taking one day at a time? Are they still in the habit of drinking alcohol? Are they still in the habit of buying alcohol? No, they are not. When you go on holiday to a place you have never been, to a hotel you have never seen and a beach you have never visited, are you in the habit of drinking on that beach at that time of the day? No. How long does it take to break this habit anyway? Is this the only habit in the world from which you are in permanent recovery? Is it the only habit that is never truly broken? Or is a more likely explanation that these people who haven’t touched a drop in years and are still finding it hard to cope are simply feeling deprived because they still feel as though they are missing out on something pleasurable; that they are not like normal people but have a disease for which there is no known cure. The reality is that alcohol addiction is just that, an addiction and not a habit.
The problem with alcohol addiction is that most drinkers really have no idea that they are hooked. They honestly think they are drinking because they choose to and because they enjoy it. If they cannot think of a rational reason fo
r why they are drinking they will resort to calling it a habit. We have told the same lies about alcohol for so long that we all end up believing them. I was constantly justifying why I drank, just as the majority of drinkers do. We instinctively know that we shouldn’t be doing it and we instinctively know that it is not normal to poison ourselves. We sense that we are miserable at times if we are not allowed to drink. We even have moments when we sense we just might be hooked. So, in order to rationalise our drinking, we have to build up all these sound reasons for not being able to enjoy ourselves without first taking a drug. As you know, if you tell a lie for long enough and convincingly enough, even the person who started the lie will end up believing it.