What I am about to discuss I've previously said many times and have been ignored, despite its truth. I expect to be ignored again, but that's life; not science, but life. If the following quote was made by any scientific group studying any disease known to man other than addictions, the scientists in that group, at least the chiefs, would be summarily dismissed for incompetence and the patients with the disease would raise hell. However, because the disease is alcoholism, an addiction, an entity where no one cares about the truth, only control, the following lies are finessed by government employed experts in their report to congress. This article is written to beseech congress to remove the people running the NIAAA if it wants real answers to questions about alcoholism. This article makes much the same point I made in a previous article about firing Leshner from NIDA, National Institutes of Drug Abuse found at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/15replacingalanleshneristheonlywaytoendthedrugwar/ and, for the same reasons. In fact, both groups should be disbanded and started over from scratch as a single institute on addictions.

The point of both articles is that the governmental agencies responsible for overseeing the research on addictions are biased, prejudiced, closed-minded, incompetent, and liars. They don't deserve our trust or money and should be overhauled because of this.

The following quote is taken from the "10th Special Report to the U.S. Congress on Alcohol and Health," the tenth in a series of reports from the NIAAA (National Institutes of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse) to congress, and clearly shows, after a critical reading, that the NIAAA is completely out of touch with the disease about which it claims expertise. The complete report can be obtained from the NIAAA or is available on their web site at:

http://silk.nih.gov/silk/niaaa1/publication/10report/10-order.htm, or http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/10report/intro.pdf

The report from which it came was to inform the congress on NIAAA's progress (or lack thereof) in understanding "alcoholism" so that congress might then evaluate their work and decide on financial support and, I would hope, the presence or absence of expertise in the NIH. The report contains the same large amounts of mumbo-jumbo pseudoscience as in previous reports meant only to impress, but without any corresponding understanding of the entity it discussed. My impression is that the report passed congress's scrutiny mainly because they had no one to help them evaluate it for validity other than the ones presenting it to them. This is not the best way to evaluate a scientific issue. The quote I exerpted from the report displays the arrogant nature of the NIAAA, the clear disdain for accountability, its lack of peer review and integrity, its many unfounded assumptions, and its lack of shame for a massive conceptual error without any attempt to rectify it other than to note it. Moreover, the section of the report from which it came, advances in alcoholism genetics, completely misrepresents and misapplies the drastically new data it admits to correct, thus, maintaining the old concept of alcoholism unrevised, despite the diametrical nature of the new information. I've never seen such important paradigm changing information be sloughed off as slickly as they managed to do so.

The quote:

"At the time of publication of the Ninth Special Report to the U.S. Congress on Alcohol and Health (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism 1997), twin, family, and adoption studies had very firmly established major roles for both genetics and environment in the etiology of alcoholism in men. Although the earlier studies had failed to detect a genetic component of alcoholism in women, the newest studies at that time were beginning to suggest that alcoholism is as strongly genetically influenced in women as it is in men. Since alcoholism does not follow the simple rules of Mendelian inheritance in multi-generational pedigrees, it was clear that alcoholism is a genetically complex disorder, influenced by multiple genes (their precise number unknown) that interact in an unknown fashion with each other and with similarly unknown environmental factors to produce the disease. It also seemed highly likely that alcoholism is genetically heterogeneous, meaning that individuals in different families develop alcoholism under the influence of different predisposing genes. Some twin studies had also begun to suggest a partially shared genetic influence on both alcohol and tobacco use."

There are many things missing from the full report, but one in particular is the absence of any overall and complete paradigm discussing the causation of the entity they call alcoholism, an overall picture of what causes it, its course, prognosis, and treatment, as we would expect on any other disease whose research is funded with tax payer money. There is plenty of the old theory, but nothing that could possibly account for the genetics discussed in the quote. Notice their wording, "beginning to suggest." 67% heritability is "beginning to suggest" something? This level of heritability is very high and clearly shows that alcoholism, if there is such a thing, is inherited and any paradigm explaining alcoholism must be centered around this fact. It's absolutely equal to and as strong as male alcoholism heritability! In other words, all alcoholism is basically genetic. The quote is, additionally, as close as they get to something resembling a paradigm anywhere in the entire report and it falls very short from even resembling a paradigm. What is remarkable in the quoted section are two things: 1) a continued confusingly vague statement of the "genetic and environmental" etiology of alcoholism, absent any scientific proof of environmental etiology either in this report or in the previous ones. Environmental "proof" has always consisted of whatever percentage is left over from the number 100% after the newly measured and decifered genetic percent is subtracted, even when the genetics percentage is not a firm number (obviously) and may actually be 100%. Whatever the actual percent turns out to be, it is certainly approaching closer to 100% as time passes. And 2) a brief mention of a MAJOR mistake and change in the heritability of female alcoholism, from 0% to 67%, a significant mistake and scientific difference used in the recent past to deeply influence public opinions about the environmental cause of alcoholism, especially in women. The retraction, the new percentage of female heritability of 67%, however, is much less well known to the public than was the faulty genetics study that showed 0%. In fact, high heritability of alcoholism and other addictions is predicted by my seven year old paradigm which is still being ignored even though it is now shown to be correct. The vague statement on the NIAAA views on alcoholism etiology hasn't changed one bit from previous statements despite this major change in the genetics of female alcoholism, as if this "new" finding made no difference in their paradigm except to put a little more emphasis on genetics, but not changing the overall picture they want the public and congress to believe, that alcoholism is environmental and can be prevented and controlled. How is it possible for the same NIAAA alcoholism paradigm to be consistent with both a 0% female heritability and a 67% heritability simultaneously? Re-read the last two sentences until you comprehend the impossibility of this and what it implies. You have to read the previous reports to congress to see lack of any significant paradigm change since the new information on female alcoholism for yourself. This lack of paradigm change despite these new female heritability numbers is unimaginable and is clear evidence for a fallaceous paradigm, past and current. A fallaceous paradigm means a wrong paradigm. This means they have no idea what causes alcoholism, that they don't understand alcoholism, and when they say they do, they are lying. These NIAAA experts are no more experts in alcoholism than is my dog. They have a paradigm but it hasn't anything to do with facts, science, or reality of the addiction. It's the same paradigm that has existed for 60 years despite all the good science since then; the good science that I have used to formulate the true neurobiological paradigm of addictions, the one that actually fits all the real science, genetics, and reality of all addictions, not just one addiction such as "alcoholism" or another. Moreover, their rationalizations for why they missed the female genetic link, something everybody in the world knew about but somehow the NIAAA was unaware of, that the genetics is complicated, is also quite pathetic. That alcoholism is highly genetic has been known for 40-50 years. I can remember clearly when the previous studies about female alcoholism came out in the news, forthrightly minimizing the genetics in female alcoholics and concluding from this the damning nongenetic and thus volitional nature of what they call "alcohol abuse" in these women. I have sat in AA meetings for over twenty years listening to female alcoholics discuss their alcoholic families, no different from male alcoholics, yet the NIAAA somehow missed it. Who were they listening to? "OOPS," they might be heard to say, "sorry, we got that part wrong, but nothing else in our theory on alcoholism has changed or is wrong. We're still the experts. Trust our expertise." Pardon me?????

The pathetic nature of the quoted statement as well as it being evidence for the incompetence and bias of those making it actually puts the future understanding of addictions at high risk under NIAAA auspices, especially since the future research and publications about addictions are designed, written, and funded by this ignorant group. The bias of the NIAAA has always been towards an "environmental" etiologic paradigm supported by pseudoscience and psychobabble despite no valid evidence for environmental etiology and much evidence for a genetic and neurobiological mechanism inexorably causing addiction. When a presumed disease, and I call alcoholism a presumed disease because it actually is a symptom of a disease and not a disease at all, (see: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thirdmilleniumn4aconferencekeynoteaddressonhypoism/), is discovered to be higher than 67% genetic in etiology, no amount of bias or imagination can compel a belief that environment, no matter how one defines environment, is the cause of the disease. Once science has defined this high a degree of inheritance, one must dump environmentalism and begin in ernest to look for the underlying biological mechanism where the genetics works, not just for the genes which are working within this mechanism. No such attempts have been made to propose the mechanism in this or other highly heritable addictions, all of which have just as high or higher heritabilities. (see: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/recentgeneticstudiesonvariousaddictionsfromalargetwinregistr/

I am the only person who has defined such a mechanism and my mechanism, Hypoism, is being wholly ignored, not just by biased scientists, but by every biased group involved in addictions including recovering addicts who are biased towards addiction being a "spiritual" disease, whatever that means.

The genetic and mechanistic etiology of addictions cries out for a new model and paradigm. This model exists and has existed for over eight years, yet the NIH continues to travel the old environmental road to nowhere because of outdated psychological and environmental biases. Someone out there must read this brief article and inform congress that it is being misled and lied to by the NIH and that the NIH is consciously doing so for biased and unscientific reasons. I have tried to accomplish this, but have been ignored. Please send this article to your congressperson and local newspapers so they may look into the scam being perpetrated on them and the country and make the changes necessary to put addictions on an equal footing with the rest of medicine. The NIH will ignore all criticism until they are made to acknowledge it by enough noise and outside pressure.