More than a million English-speaking people a day use Google to try and decide if they, or some one close to them, is an alcoholic.
30 years ago I knew that I was drinking too much, but had trouble admitting it to myself and vigorously opposed any suggestion that it might be a good idea to cut down on my consumption.
I avoided asking the question "Am I an alcoholic?" because I was afraid of the answer; I am a brewer by profession (bryggeren is the Norwegian for the brewer ) beer production and its consumption were intimately involved in every aspect of my work and social life, my wife and all my friends were also involved in brewing in one way or another
In 2012 when I pose the question "Am I an alcoholic? " I don't know what the answer is; I no longer drink, my liver function is as healthy as if I had never drunk alcohol; Alcoholics Anonymous insist that I am still an alcoholic but I wonder because I am such a totally different person.
The biggest change is not in the way I behave, but inside my head; I am still fascinated by beer and its production, but even when it is freely available and all around me, I am never tempted to drink it.
I don't know how quickly this change in my life happened, it was not the result of intense therapy or some life-changing event, but I became aware of the change 6 weeks after I started taking the drug Campral.
Although Campral was prescribed by my GP, it was at my request. I did not have a support worker or group, or attend AA meetings, I just took Campral and lived my life normally - and to be perfectly honest - I had very low expectations of deriving any benefit from the drug, I was taking it to keep the peace - to please someone else.
When I started taking Campral I was already at the stage where I drank alcohol very rarely but knew I would never give it up completely, but one evening in what used to be one of the pubs I most visited most frequently, I was asked what I would like to drink and I answered "Soda and lime please" and I have never drunk, or been tempted to drink alcohol since then.
Because my experience with Campral was just as the manufacturers claimed it would be, for a long time I thought my experience was typical, but I found out it was extremely unusual; in the UK clinical trials Campral was found to be no better than the placebo.
3 years later it was discovered that all of those who had been treated with Campral and were abstinent at the end of the trial, had still not started drinking again, whereas almost all in the control group had. Although they were very few in number, there were some individuals for whom Campral had brought about profound change.
I want to use this blog to describe my own experience with Campral, and hope that others who have experienced similar transformation of their lives will get in touch so that we can establish just what we have in common that made Campral work so well for us but be completely ineffective in most patients.
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