The Associated Press
ANN ARBOR, Mich. Ä Every day "Vicki" would get drunk after work. On the weekends, she would start earlier. It became a routine.
"Initially, I think, it was to relax," she said. "It was a meeting place with my husband. It was a chance to be with him and a chance to talk with him."
But it progressed, over seven years or so, to a level that Vicki could no longer control. She was drinking about 11/2 pitchers of beer a night, then trying to get up for work the next morning.
"I'm probably less successful than with where I would have gone with my career," said Vicki, who asked that her real name not be used. "I suspected in the back of my head I could have done things if I hadn't been taking the first two hours recovering from the evening before."
Vicki, 32, had been trying to decrease her drinking when she learned about DrinkWise, a new program offered by the University of Michigan Medical Center to help mild to moderate drinkers control their intake.
The program appealed to Vicki because it allows participants to choose either moderation or abstinence as a goal, unlike programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous that mandate abstinence.
"I didn't feel there was something socially wrong with having a drink here or there," Vicki said. "But I didn't want it to consume as much of my time as it was."
DrinkWise is a brief intervention program that teaches mild to moderate drinkers who are considered at risk for developing serious problems how to drink more responsibly.
The program helps participants identify why they drink, offers them alternatives to drinking and teaches them how to monitor their drinking and pace themselves when they do drink.
"We recognize the fact that a drink or two is something that people like and it doesn't have to be a negative thing in their life," said Teresa Herzog Mourad, a DrinkWise counselor.
About 47 percent of Michigan adults abstain from alcohol, roughly 27 percent are light drinkers, about 21.5 percent are moderate and almost 5 percent are heavy drinkers, according to Michigan Department of Health statistics.
DrinkWise targets those within the 21.5 percent of moderate drinkers who are showing signs of becoming heavy drinkers, said Keith Bruhnsen, manager of DrinkWise.
"If we don't do something in terms of early intervention with them, there is the possibility they will go on to be severely dependent," Bruhnsen said. "There is no way to predict who that group will be."
DrinkWise isn't for everyone, Bruhnsen said. Counselors automatically exclude someone who has a drug dependency, is going through a personal crisis, meets accepted guidelines for severe dependency or has doubts about his or her ability to control consumption.
But Jim Balmer, president of the Dawn Farm substance abuse treatment program in the Ann Arbor area, said he is skeptical whether DrinkWise can effectively screen out those who have serious problems.
In addition, since DrinkWise is a for-profit program not covered by most insurance, Balmer said there is little incentive to refer people elsewhere.
"If they help people, more power to them," Balmer said. "If they hurt people by allowing real alcoholics to believe they can control their drinking when they can't."
Melinda Mount, associate executive director of the National Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors in Arlington, Va., said her concern about a program like this would be that true alcoholics would not be excluded. Alcoholics cannot maintain control over their consumption and need a supervised withdrawal program, she said.
"For people who are not addicts, this sort of awareness-type program will work very well," Mount said. "For someone who is truly addicted, more often it will not."
People interested in DrinkWise must go through a 73-item screening, which costs $75. Through that, counselors determine whether DrinkWise can help, or whether the person's drinking is beyond its scope, in which case they recommend another program such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
Bruhnsen said he may still try to counsel people who meet some of the generally accepted criteria for severe dependency. But he said those clients must understand they could be referred to another treatment program if DrinkWise's methods don't seem to help.
The program costs $520 for four hour-long one-on-one sessions with a counselor or $320 for five two-hour small group sessions. Those who have completed the program are evaluated after periods of three and nine months.
Early sessions help participants define why they drink and later sessions teach alternatives to drinking and strategies to control consumption.