by Stanton Peele

About the author: Stanton Peele is a psychologist and researcher specializing in drug and alcohol addiction, and he is the author of The Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control, from which the following viewpoint was excerpted.

Alcoholics Anonymous originally claimed that alcoholics inherit an “allergy” to alcohol that underlies their loss of control when they drink. Today this particular idea has been discarded. Nonetheless, a tremendous investment has been made in the search for biological inheritances that may cause alcoholism, while many grandiose claims have been made about the fruits of this search. In 1987, almost two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) agreed that “alcoholism can be hereditary”; only five years earlier, in 1982, more people had disagreed (50 percent) than...