Never Have I Had the Urge: To be an Alcoholic

“Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.”

In the Season 2 premiere of Never Have I Had the Urge, Victor takes us deep into the "engine room" of recovery. We aren't just talking about the struggle; we are looking at the manual. From the ancient history of "King Alcohol" to a cold morning in 1935 Akron, Ohio, this episode explores how a "creeping vine" of sobriety crossed oceans and language barriers to save millions of lives.

Victor shares his own journey—from the high-intensity culture of the military at Fort Leonard Wood to the moment he simply "lost the taste" for the thrill. It’s a raw look at the difference between having a drink and drinking alcoholically.

Whether you are a newcomer looking for a blueprint, a old-timer reflecting on the "First One Hundred," or someone just trying to understand the "Urge," this episode breaks down "How It Works" for the modern world.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Season two, episode one. Never have I ever had the urge to be an alcoholic. If you've ever stepped into an AA meeting, whether it's a church basement in North Carolina or a community center somewhere in Tokyo, you've heard these words read aloud at the start of every meeting. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program. Usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault. They seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those two who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest. Hey friends, that's called How It Works. And I want you to really think about that title for a second. When you go into a store and buy a coffee maker or an appliance, or even when you get a new car, what's the first thing you find when you open the box up? An instruction manual. If you look in the glove compartment, there's a manual to understand the mechanics of the machine you're dealing with. That's what this is. It's not a speech, it's the instructions for a way up and out of active alcohol addiction. It's the blueprint for the person who has felt that driving, relentless urge to keep drinking until the world blurs out. But to understand the how, we have to understand the what and the why. We have to look at this substance that has been running parallel to human history since the very beginning. Long before there were manuals or meetings, there was the crush of the grape. Alcohol isn't a moderate invention. We've been at this for thousands of years. From the moment the first humans realized that fermented fruit changed the way they felt, that it had a mind and mood altering effect on them, we've been caught in a complicated dance with the bottle. It started with simple fermentation. Man and woman discovering the nature had a way of hiding a buzz inside a harvest. From those first crushed grapes in ancient civilizations to the global industry we see today, the urge has always been there. To understand why there's a manual, you have to understand the power of the thing we're up against: king alcohol. And let me tell you, the king is a cruel taskmaster. See, for most people, a drink is just a drink. They have one or two at dinner, they put the glass down, and they're able to walk away. Their internal off switch works perfectly, but for some, that switch is broken. They already know one drink is too many, and a thousand is never enough. It's a physical craving combined with the mental obsession that defies all logic. And King Alcohol is an equal opportunity destroyer. He doesn't care about your bank account, the color of your skin, or whether you're a man or a woman. He doesn't care if you're a CEO in a high-rise or a kid in the urban heart of a city. He'll take the house, he'll take the family, and eventually he'll take your soul. Look at the wake he leaves behind. In this country alone, we're talking about nearly 13,000 people killed every year in alcohol-related driving accidents. That's thousands of families shattered, thousands of people sitting behind bars today because of one split-second decision made under the king's command. Go into any major city, walk through the urban areas that are already struggling, and you'll see the plight. You see it in the broken glass on the sidewalks and in the broken lives on the street corners. It's a global weight, a plague that affects every corner of the world, draining our health, our safety, and our potential. But before we talk about the light, we have to acknowledge just how dark it gets when you're caught in the grip. Now, you might think something this massive, a movement that spans the globe, must have started with a huge government grant or a team of world-class scientists in some laboratory. But the truth is much more quieter than that. It all started in 1935 in Akron, Ohio. It started with two men who were at the very end of their ropes. One was a New York stockbroker named Bill Wilson, and the other was a local surgeon, Dr. Bob Smith. They were both caught in the grip of King Alcohol, and both of them were failing. But then something happened that changed history. They sat down and talked, not as doctor and patient, but as two equals. They realized that when one alcoholic shared their raw, unfiltered truth with another one, the urge to take that first drink lost just a little bit of its power. It wasn't a landslide victory. It started slowly, like a creeping vine finding cracks in a stone wall. They started a meeting place. And for the first few years, there were only a handful of members. They were figuring out as they went along, writing down their experiences, which eventually became the big book of AA in 1939. From those two men in the kitchen in Ohio, it began to stretch. It moved from Akron to New York, then across the Midwest, and eventually it crossed oceans. It had to be translated because the urge doesn't speak just one language. Today, whether you're in a village in South America or high-rise in Berlin, Germany, those same instructions, how it works, those same 12 steps are being read in over 100 different languages. And the science, it's finally catching up to what those two men discovered by accident. Modern medicine now looks at AA and C's peer-led intervention that actually rewires the brain. To really appreciate how this AA vine grew, you have to understand the soil it was planted in. In the early 1930s, if you couldn't stop drinking, you weren't just sick, you were a pariah. You were tucked away in the back rooms of hospitals or sent to insane asylums. The medical world had basically signed a collective death warrant for the alcoholic. They called them the unfortunates. So when Bill Wilson and Bob Smith sat in that kitchen in Akron, they weren't just fighting for sobriety, they were fighting for their lives against a world that had already given up on them. Imagine the scene: no internet, no cell phones, no global network. Just a few guys in smoke-filled living rooms desperately trying to stay dry for one more day. They were the first 100. That's what they called themselves. A ragtag group of people who had been chewed up and spit out by alcohol. They started reaching out, one by one. It was slow, agonizing work. They'd spend hours at the bedside of a man in the throes of DTs, just waiting for him to clear his head enough to hear the message. There were no likes or shares back then. Just the sound of one man's voice in a dark room telling another, I've been where you are, and there is a way out. This is where the miracle happened. It wasn't just about quitting the bottle. It was about the rigorous honesty we talked about earlier. They realized that they had to stay sober, they had to clean house, they had to look at every resentment, every lie, and every bridge they had burned. And as they did this, the vine started to find more cracks. It moved through the bars, through the alleyways, and eventually into the front parlors of the middle class. People who looked fine on the outside, but were actually dying on the inside. The movement was born out of a shared desperation that crossed every social line. It was the first time in history that the shame of the drunk was replaced by the strength of the fellowship. Once that big book was in print, the secret was out. But the world in the 1940s and 50s was a big disconnected place. There was no send button. If the message was going to travel, it had to be carried. The vine started stretching towards the coastlines. It crossed the Atlantic, not in the hands of missionaries, but in the pockets of sailors and soldiers going to and returning home from the war. And businessmen who had fought found their lives again. They were carrying the how it works instructions like a piece of smuggled light. Imagine being in a city like Oslo or Rio de Janeiro in 1947. You're struggling with the same urge, that same crushing weight of king alcohol, and you think you're the only one. Then you meet a traveler who hands you a battered book. But there's a problem. It's in English. This is where the next miracle happened. People were so desperate to live sober that they didn't just read the book, they recreated it. The language barrier was just another wall for the vine to climb over. Small groups began to huddle together, translating the twelve steps word by word into Spanish, French, German, and eventually into languages and dialects that Bill and Bob had never even heard of. They realized that while cultures are different, the language of the heart is universal. A hangover in New York feels exactly like a hangover in New Delhi. The shame of a father in London is the same as the shame of a father in Mexico City. The science of it is fascinating too. We're talking about a global social contagion of health. In every country it touched, the result was the same. Crime rates related to public intoxication dropped, families were stitched back together, and the urban centers that were being drained by the plague of the bottles started to see a spark of renewal. Today, that vine has wrapped itself around the world. We're talking about over 118,000 groups in more than 180 countries. From the frozen tundras to the tropical islands, the message is the same. The manual is the same because the urge is human. The solution had to be human too. We've talked about the history, we've talked about the global explosion and the millions of lives saved. But let's get real for a minute. When you're sitting in a dark room at 2 a.m., the fact that there are millions of people in 180 countries not drinking doesn't mean a damn thing to you. In that moment, it's just you and the king. The Urge is a master of disguise. It doesn't always come at you like a tidal wave. Sometimes it's a whisper. It tells you that you had a hard day. You deserve to throw back a couple of cold ones. It tells you that you've been doing well so long that you deserve a glass of wine or two. It tells you that this time, the how it works manual doesn't apply to you because your situation is different. You are, after all, unique, and you now have all the answers. Don't be fooled. That's the individual's plight. That's the urge to drink until you can't drink anymore. It's a phenomenon of craving that bypasses your logic, your love for your family, and your instinct to survive. It's like a computer virus that rewires your brain to believe that the very thing killing you is the only thing keeping you alive. This is the crossroads where the first 100 stood. And where someone is standing right now, it's that terrifying realization that your willpower is like a flashlight with dead batteries in a pitch black forest. You can click that switch all you want, but the light isn't coming on. But here's the thing, and this is what those instructions were trying to tell us all along. You don't have to find the light or your way out of the forest on your own. The manual says we admit we are powerless. That's not a white flag of defeat. It's the moment you stop trying to fix a broken machine with the same tools that broke it in the first place. It's the moment you realize that while you can't fight the king, you can fight the urge. Now, let me be clear about one thing. I am not an authority on alcohol or even on sobriety. I'm not a doctor and I'm no scientist. What I am is a person who has been sober for a long time. Today, I don't drink by choice. But there was a long stretch of my earlier life where I didn't have a choice at all. I drank for drinking's sake. You know, I come from a family of drinkers. Maybe you do too. Maybe in your house, the sound of a can of beer cracking open or a wine bottle cork popping is the background noise to your every childhood memory. It is for me. In my family, we had both. The ones who couldn't put it down after that first drink, and the ones who never touched the stuff. I've been both of these people. When I was in high school, I was just like everybody else, partying, experimenting, thinking we were invincible. We didn't know that some of us were predisposed, that for some of us, that first spark was going to turn into a wildfire we couldn't control. Two months after graduation, I'm on a flight to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. I'm in the military, and that's where my drinking really took flight. We trained hard every day, and we drank even harder at night. It was the culture then, it was the life. But somewhere in those years, something shifted. I can't tell you the exact minute, but I remember the feeling. The thrill was gone. I no longer liked drinking. And even though it took a few more years to fully walk away from it, that was the moment sobriety started looking a lot better option than the daily grind in the bottle. Everything changed then, and I haven't looked back since. But I want you to look at your own life for a second. I want to ask you a few questions, and I want you to be as honest as the how it work manual demands. Do you find yourself planning your day around that first drink or wondering if there's enough in the house before the store closes? Have you ever looked at your family during, like, say, Thanksgiving or Christmas and realized that everyone is walking around on eggshells? Are the blue lights in the rear of your mirror a recurring nightmare for you? Or maybe a reality you're currently dealing with in a courtroom? Is your home a place of peace? Or has King Alcohol turned it into a zone of domestic tension, loud voices, broken promises, and even violence? If you're sitting there thinking, wow, that sounds like my husband, or that's exactly what my sister does, or the hardest one, that's me. Then you're in the right place. Because once you admit your life is unmanageable, that's when the instructions finally start to make sense. So where does this leave us today? AA just isn't old men with white hair and beard smoking cigarettes in church basements anymore. It's evolved. Today, you've got meetings on Zoom that run 24-7, reaching people on oil rigs in the middle of the ocean or high up on a mountain range. You've got young people in AA conventions that look more like music festivals than support groups. It's a massive, diverse, multi-generational machine that is constantly updating its own how it works through the shared experiences of millions. But for all the technology and all the growth, the heart of it hasn't changed one bit. If you walk into a meeting, whether it's in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Vietnam, Indonesia, Finland, the Philippines, or even Bulgaria, you're going to find the same thing. A group of people who have decided that they are done being slaves to king alcohol. They're working the 12 steps. And look, those steps aren't just suggestions to be nice people. They are a systematic dismantling of the ego. They are a way to clear the wreckage of the past so you can actually stand on solid ground in the present. It's about admitting you're stuck, finding a power greater than your own willpower. And then, this is the big one: doing the work to help someone else. That brings us back to the manual. Back to the beginning. Back to how it works. Because at the end of the day, sobriety isn't a mystery, it's a set of instructions. If you buy that coffee maker and you don't follow the manual, you don't get good coffee. If you try to drive that car without checking the oil, like the book says, the engine is gonna seize up. Life is no different. If you're ready to put down the bottle, if you're ready to stop the urge before it stops you, then listen to the closing of the instructions one more time. It says, clear cut directions are given showing how we recovered. It doesn't say maybe, it doesn't say possibly, it says how we recovered. It worked for a stockbroker in 1935, it worked for a soldier in the military who lost a taste for the thrill. And it can work for you. You just have to be willing to open the box and read the manual and finally understand how it works. We've covered a lot of ground today. We've looked at the history, the global reach of the vine, and the how it works instructions that have saved millions of lives. But as we close this first episode of season two, I want to leave you with one final thought. Whether you're the one struggling with the urge to drink alcoholically, or you're the one watching someone you love trapped in the bottle, remember that the manual is always there. The instructions haven't changed since 1935 because the human heart hasn't changed. We still need each other. We still need rigorous honesty. And we still need to realize that we don't have to fight alcoholism alone. If you're listening to this and you feel like your life is unmanageable, don't wait for the perfect time to read the manual. The perfect time is the moment you realize you're sick and tired of being sick and tired. This episode has been produced and hosted by me, Victor Jimenez. And this has been Never Have I Had the Urge to Be an Alcoholic. Have any show ideas you want to share with me? Send them to hello at Neverhave I Had The Urge.com. Thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next one. And remember, behind every want lies an urge. Behind every urge, there's a need.