What constitutes being an alcoholic?

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

It's all relative tho innit. One of me best mates, let's call him John - as that's his name - had a decade of serious heroin use under his belt. As an IT contractor, he was harming nobody other than himself, and even that was debatable. A sweeter, gentler, more hyper-intelligent bloke you could never wish to meet. The original 'victimless crime' we all agreed at the time. OK, he would phone in sick for about three weeks at a time whenever he tried to go cold turkey (but that was OK I was technically his line manager so could cover for him), and when he was clean-ish he would keep weird tho regular hours - 9pm til 5am more or less which didn't matter cos we were all on shifts anyway. Nobody suspected a thing cos he was IT-geeky and an Aussie to boot, so everybody just assumed he was just another computer freak. But - hey! - the minute he tried to get his act together by swopping heroin for vodka it all went pear-shaped. He got done for drunk-driving, spent various nights in police cells in various towns, those of us who knew him well said 'Hey John, well done, you're doing really well there mate' even when he was well into at least a bottle of vod a day. As for his unsuspecting co-workers well, they, were completely disgusted that although he was now doing 9am to 5pm, he would spend three or four hours down the pub every day and coming back with alcohol fumes seeping out of every pore. He never got sacked (they were slack that way) but his long-time contract didn't get ectended either.

And I'm sure there's a moral in there somewhere - tho I'll be phukt if I know what it is...