At the depths of his alcoholism Jim drank every day of the week. That wasn’t unusual, since he’d been doing it since age 13, but he was starting to pay a heavy price.
He alternately suffered from depression and anxiety. He treated one with booze – which ensured that the depression continued – and the other with prescription tranquilizers.
Unhealthy, overweight and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, Jim (not his real name) was on a decline that was getting steeper.
“I had high blood pressure at age 27,” says Jim, now 30, sober and living Slave Lake. “I weighed 240 pounds.”
Jim says he started experimenting with booze at age 12 in the rural community northwest of Slave Lake that he grew up in. By 13 he was a heavy drinker.
“Trying to be cool, trying to fit in,” he says. “That’s when it starts. Then it becomes an addiction.”
For years, he didn’t realize that; didn’t even consider it. He probably didn’t want to. He was having too much fun, or he thought he was.
“I had this image,” he says. “No one could tell me what to do.”
Although drinking heavily throughout his teens, Jim managed to complete Grade 9 and then started working, mostly in construction.
“I had to work hard to support my addiction,” he says.
Along the way a wife and three children entered the picture. He says he wasn’t much of a father to his kids in their early years.
“I would just leave for days,” he says.
The drinking might have been bad through his teens and early 20s, but it seemed manageable. In the last five years, it became unmanageable. Jim says the depression and the anxiety set in and he couldn’t work anymore. He took the tranquilizers every day for the anxiety and generally felt so bad, “I had to have a drink, just to be happy.”
But it wasn’t working. He felt terrible, and his health was in rough shape, thanks to a combination of factors that included a poor diet.
The heavy drinking continued.
“I drank so much that the doctor told me I was going to die if I didn’t give it up,” he says. “I kept on partying.”
A second doctor told him the same thing. He tried to drink the worry away. But by the time a third doctor gave him the same message, something had changed. He was ready to consider alternatives.
“I started checking out AADAC,” he says. “I went once a week to see Sandy (an addictions counselor). She helped me a lot.” Jim agreed with his counselor to try a program of reducing his alcohol consumption to once or twice a week. That seemed to work and he cut it back even more. The program included adding healthy activities to a lifestyle that hadn’t had many of those. He started doing more things with his wife and children. He also started working out and researched vitamin and herbal therapies as an alternative to drugs to control his depression and anxiety. Pretty quickly he noticed a difference in the way he felt.
“It’s amazing what vitamins can do,” he says.
With improving health and a clear head for the first time in years, Jim realized what the booze had been doing to him. Not only to him, but how it was destroying trust and hurting family and other relationships.
“My parents told me I never knew how much I hurt them.”
Jim has been sober now for just over a year. It’s been two years since he started the AADAC program and cut back so drastically on his drinking. He says he’s feeling pretty good about the way things are going, and so, obviously, are his wife and kids. He’s spending a lot more time doing things with them now. He notes that his son is at the age now where he was when he got into drinking. He sees kids of the same age around town getting into the same mode, partying all the time.
“It reminds me of how foolish I was,” he says.
The foolishness turned to addiction, which is a kind of blind helplessness. Jim is grateful he could find the right people to help him when he was ready to do something to free himself. Besides Sandy of AADAC, he singles out Dr. Kasavan and Marcus, a Mental Health counselor for special thanks.
On a final note, Jim says drinking and driving is a big problem that deserves more attention. He did it a lot himself and he knows there are plenty of other people doing it. He thinks police should come down harder on it.
“It’s outrageous,” he says.

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