Not long ago, journalist Teri Sforza of the Orange County Register, who had just returned from the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s yearly conference, wrote a piece in the form of a letter to California’s Governor Newsom. In particular, it addressed California’s announced plan to spend around six and a half billion dollars to alleviate homelessness among the mentally ill.

She began with some statistics from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, emphasizing the contrast between death tolls from drugs and alcohol:

In California, a record-breaking 11,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2022. But nearly twice that many — 19,335 — die from alcohol-related diseases every year in the Golden State…

One of the author’s main points is that anybody who is old enough according to the law in any given state, can walk into a grocery store and buy copious amounts of the most prevalent drug of abuse. If numbers mean anything, alcohol is still the deadliest addictive drug there is, and Sforza seems to want to grab every legislator by the shoulders and shake some sense into them. Although this may come as a shock to the citizenry, and even to the majority of experts, we are talking about “the most widespread and pernicious addiction in America”.

Everyone in the United States should know by now that alcohol prohibition (1920-1933) was a miserable failure that created numerous other problems, like the ascendency of powerful criminal organizations not only among the populace but inside the ranks of law enforcement, as well as massive corruption that turned far too many politicians into criminals, even if they were never identified or charged as such.

Sforza does not venture into that territory. The main point expressed here seems to be that family doctors and general practitioners have pretty much given up on even discussing alcohol use with their patients. She has a few seemingly mild yet apropos words for Gov. Newsom himself:

As a founding partner of [a] wine, food and hospitality company that includes three Napa Valley wineries, we hope you’ll take this to heart…

The writer quotes the director of UCLA’s Addiction Medicine Fellowship, Dr. Julio Meza:

Before 2020, the main reasons for a liver transplant at UCLA were Hepatitis C, tumors and then alcohol. Now at UCLA, the main reason for a liver transplant is alcohol.

A liver transplant is a procedure of last resort. At this point in the progression of illness, the patient either obtains a used whole or partial liver from someone else, or life ends. A kidney at least can be obtained from a living donor who has one to spare. But for a liver transplant, in most cases, somebody has to have died.

In either scenario, the demand for spare parts far exceeds the supply. Currently, fewer than one-10th of such operations utilize a chunk of the organ from a living donor. The donor retains only part of the liver, and the patient receives only part of the liver. Fortunately, either piece “can” grow back to full size. However, “Some chronic liver diseases will simply resume their destructive work on the new liver.”

Each year in America more than 12,000 desperately sick people are added to the list of hopeful recipients, while the available cadaver livers come nowhere close to supplying the demand. And to even be placed on the national waiting list, the patient must convince the medical authorities that there will be no future dependency upon the substance that caused the problem in the first place.

Sforza goes on to discuss the differences between detoxification — or mere, technical sobriety, which is in reality only “the first tiny step” — and actual recovery. But that is a subject for another day, as is delineating how all this discouraging information relates back to the alleviation of homelessness.

Sources:

“Gov. Newsom, the drug that kills most Americans is on grocery store shelves,” OCRegister.com,” April 9, 2024.

“Liver Transplantation,” ClevelandClinic.org, undated.

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