Learned Vs Hereditary
Researchers have spent decades trying to find a correlation between genes and alcohol addiction. While many have argued that heredity is a primary factor, there has been a lack of definitive scientific evidence to support that theory.
Nancy Roget the Director of the Center for the Application of Substance Abuse Technologies and Gary Fisher state “addictions do seem to run in families. The child of an alcoholic has a probability… ten times as strong” (10), than a child with a non-alcoholic parent.
Learned
Hereditary
In fact Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D., is a psychologist, attorney, psychotherapist and the author of books and articles on the subject of alcoholism, addiction and addiction treatment, argues that the possibility of hereditary addiction is so common as to be ridiculous. He states that if the science was true “it would seem that half of the population has some form of these addiction genes” (3). This observation proves further that hereditary addiction is over estimated in the population with the more likely culprit being a learned behavior.