Can you fight the disease of alcohol addiction and still be a social drinker? Making such a stance was heretical only a generation ago. Yet controlled drinking, as it is called, has emerged as an accepted treatment option for those who find abstinence too daunting.

There is a continuum of alcohol/drug use: Instead of seeing alcohol or drug use in black-and-white terms of using or not using, the idea of a continuum recognizes that there are different levels of use, from occasional, to regular, to heavy, and on to chaotic use. In general, the closer you are to the low-use end of the continuum, the more harm you are reducing.

Studies have clearly shown that some individuals who were dependent on alcohol, or who were alcoholic, were able to learn how to moderate their drinking. A well-designed study sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that about 38 percent of people who suffered from alcohol dependence were successfully addressing their problem by engaging in low-risk drinking.

Since the late 1970's so-called 12 Step, or Minnesota Model, based treatment has been nearly the only approach available to people seeking help with alcohol and drug abuse problems.  This is startling given their long term success rates of less then ten percent. Only recently have alternatives begun to receive some of the attention they deserve.

The Chicago Tribune moralizes about the risks of alcohol with numbers, but misleads readers on the real story; it seems to have put moderate drinking in the doghouse.

As a hospital doctor I see people in their twenties and thirties every month with liver disease. More and more young people, especially young women, are developing this silent disease, often without the faintest idea their drinking was harmful.

Moderate drinking seems to raise HDL (“good”) cholesterol, helping reduce the risk for heart disease and possibly stroke, a study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston indicates. Alcohol also makes blood platelets less sticky, so they’re less likely to form into potential heart-attack-inducing clots.

Complete abstinence is the prevailing philosophy of most programs, and the bedrock of Alcoholics Anonymous. Moderation “is a good idea, but it’s never worked,” said Mercy Hospital alcohol counselor Peter Chapman.

The couple were chronic alcoholics - decades of hard drinking had left their lives in a mess, and they were penniless and living rough on the streets. To look at them today, however, sitting in their comfortable home sipping a glass of wine, you'd never believe that they'd almost drunk themselves to death.

“We are not against anybody going to AA if that’s what they want,” says Lilian. “But we say that lifelong sobriety is not recovery from alcoholism, as AA prescribes. That is only treating the symptom rather than the underlying cause, and as such is merely a damage-limitation exercise.”