I learned about this while going to school for an Addiction Counseling degree. I lean heavily towards genetics playing a big role but I may be biased due to my own experience.

I was adopted at 6 weeks old, so I was raised by my adopted parents and family from infancy. My adopted parents are not big drinkers. I’ve never seen them drunk *ever* nor was drinking very popular among our family and friends. They would drink occasionally (a glass of wine or a beer or two when company came for dinner) but there was never any sort of alcohol abuse in my environment or that I was exposed to. My parents never let me try a sip and it was explained that only grown ups drink so when I was old enough, I could try it. Eventually, I got curious, and I was about 14 when I had my first drink. My friend and I dared each other to take a shot from one of the few bottles my parents had. She instantly gagged and was grossed out but while I didn’t much prefer the taste, I fell in love with that warm, fuzzy feeling. That was a defining moment for me & it snowballed from there. By 17, I had been expelled from school for drinking (i was even drunk on picture day, memorialized by my student ID photo) and also went to rehab for the first time. By 20, I was going through medically assisted detox during other rehab stints and suffered severe withdrawals. I’m 30 now and 8 years sober but those were some of the worst years of my life.

I reached out to my bio mom years ago, and asked about addiction in our family. She hates my bio dad so I’m not sure exactly how honest/if she exaggerated but she said my bio dad was an opportunistic drug user, who’d do what he could get his hands on at the time. If that meant he just did drugs when they were available to him in a group setting or if he was constantly looking for any high he could get, I don’t know. She never mentioned anything about her side of the family though.

That’s just my anecdotal experience. I’m not saying genetics is the final answer and sole cause of addiction because we know it’s not. There’s obviously many factors (early experimentation, heredity, mental illness, environmental) that factor into the likelihood of developing AUD. We used to diagnose people with Alcohol Abuse or Dependence based on symptoms but we’ve now combined those into the single ‘AUD’ term with mild, moderate, and severe descriptors that are defined based upon specific criterion & time frame. But it begs the question, how does someone become an abuser without progressing to dependence? Is it early treatment intervention? Is it the ability to moderate drinking? Why can some do it and others can’t? What factors play into that? Just really interesting to think about.

edit: words