Chris: Today, we’re talking with Roy Eskapa, the author of The Cure for Alcoholism. Thanks so much for joining us. Can you kind of explain to people what you mean by “the cure for alcoholism?” That is a pretty bold statement, we have to stay.

Roy: It is a bold statement, and what we mean by that is that the individual starts out drinking, and they’re not alcoholics to begin with. If they have a genetic predisposition, they drink in something called the opiate system in the brain. Once that occurs, it’s taken place over several years of drinking, it never goes away, which is why they relapse. We discovered something called the alcohol deprivation effect. This is where once addicted, the person if they are deprived of alcohol, the craving increases and increases because the system, the software, the wiring in the brain remains intact for life, and that was one of the first main discoveries. The other thing was that alcohol works in a similar way – similar system to opiates, things like morphine or heroine that when we drink alcohol, there this release of endorphins which are the bodies natural opiate like substances, and it seems to be in susceptible, in people who have inherited the predisposition that this thing gets much strengthened over time. That system until now, until Sinclair’s method, has not been reversible. What we mean by cure is that at the end of the treatment, pretty much of the three to four months on average, if the person taking the medication and drinking at the same time, the system becomes weaker in reversed. It’s removed because the brain is actually restored the condition it was in before the addiction was developed. It actually rolls back the addiction. It takes the brain to its original preaddictive state before the first drink was (inaudible). That’s why it’s a bold claim, and this has been shown in animals. Their brains have been examined before and after treatment, and we can see it in people. Either they abstain, about one third of the patients abstain – and this is a lot of patients we’re talking about now, many clinical trials – or they carry on drinking but within safe limits, social acceptable and safe limits. They are now able to choose whereas before the only way to abstain was basically do whatever you could not to have a drink. Go to AA. Go to rehab. Do whatever, but don’t have another drink. That was correct until now because the brain was not curable. You could not cure the addiction in the brain until Sinclair came up with his method.

Chris: You have a chapter in your book called the human cost of that. What is the human cost?

Roy: Well, alcoholism has been with us since ancient times, and it’s caused problems not for everybody. The human cost on a worldwide scale is that 1.8 million people according to the World Health Organization die from it every year, and in the United States about 105,000 according to the American Medical Association. It’s a huge cost. It’s the single biggest drain on society health wise in the states. It costs almost $200 billion, $187 billion, which is equivalent to two-thirds of the Pentagon 2003 budget if you add up all the lost work there, the car accidents, the medical illnesses, the broken homes. It’s a massive cost on society, a massive drain – broken marriages, families, abandoned children, drunk driving. It’s huge, absolutely huge. This has been studied by the US government, by the NIAAA, which is the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the NIDA, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Office of Applied Studies Center. They find data for example like approximately seven-tenths of Americans age 18 and older 1.8 million have a drinking problem. Of these 1.8 million are clear alcoholics way down the line. They’ve lost complete control of their drink.

Chris: Where’s that line with alcoholism?

Roy: It’s not a very clear line. People generally get a sense of when they’ve lost control, and it doesn’t seem to happen immediately. There are things like blacking out, saying things that they regret, feeling terrible, having terrible hangovers, feeling that they’re craving alcohol. These are the main thoughts and issues. It’s not one day you’re an alcoholic, and then the next day you’re not. In fact, nobody walks into a bar at age 21, orders a drink and is an alcoholic or steals it from their parents’ cabinet, has one drink and they’re an alcoholic. It’s something that’s generally considered to be learned. It’s accepted that it’s a learned phenomenon. It requires two things to develop. You need to have a genetic predisposition, the biology, and you have to drink not once, but many times over much time, and then that puts you through the system in the brain, the biology of addiction that keeps on driving. It’s very much like a new thirst is developed. We all are born with a thirst for water. If we’re in the desert for 72 hours, and we haven’t had water, and somebody puts water in front of you, it’s virtually impossible to refuse it. The craving is overwhelming, and this is what happens eventually with alcoholics, with people who become addicted. The longer they abstain, often people try on their own, and think, “Well, I won’t drink tonight,” and they don’t. They can go for a few days, but eventually very much like dieting, they fall pretty to the overwhelming urge to craving, and they have a drink. Usually, at that point, they drink far more than they would have. There is no clear line on when one is an alcoholic. There’s lots of questionnaires that have been developed, but there’s no absolute clear line when one is more or less thought of having lost control over one’s drinking. That can be fairly mild in the success of social drinking, or it can be clear alcoholism where people wake up at three in the morning to have a drink because otherwise they will go into withdrawal. When thoughts keep popping into one’s head and one of the things that this book addresses reduces that. It removes the biology of the craving. It reduces the power of the opiode system, but we can get into that a little later, and people simply stop thinking about alcohol. They lose interest in it. It doesn’t have an important place in their life. One of the main myths is that alcoholism is incurable. That’s a very big myth, and that alcoholism is something that people are born with, and psychologists have taught stay away from treating alcoholics. They are liars. They are incurable, and it is under their personal control. One of the first main myths and this is a myth that is associated with medical doctors and psychologists as well as the general public is that it’s an incurable thing, and once you’re an alcoholic, you’re always going to be an alcoholic. That’s also a myth that was true until now since the Sinclair method, which is what the book is about, as Alcoholic Anonymous says, “Once an alcoholic always anonymous,” they’re correct. One of the other myths is that you have a weak personality that it’s an immoral illness, pretty much that’s saying that leprosy is an immoral condition of bad morality and weakness. Alcoholism is thought of that way. In fact, about ten percent of alcoholics are able to stop on their own, which is why the traditional treatment – the twelve step AA or other abstinence based treatments have always had really up until now, give ten to sixteen percent levels of things like abstinence for life.

Chris: So, that’s what’s been available so far to people struggling with alcoholism is the abstinence only program.

Roy: Yes, that generally by and large, the staple that people get for treatment, not just in the United States, but abroad as well. The idea is stay sober as long as you can, and if you relapse, get back on the wagon. The success rates for traditional treatment, if you look at the NIAAA or NIBA or WHO, figures are between ten and fifteen percent. This is measured in terms of absolute abstinence. For the rest of their lives, they can never have another drink. For example, there’s a famous actor who in the United States with abstinence for twenty years, and he had one drink after twenty years, and he ended up relapsing very badly, and had to go twice for rehabilitation. The main thing was to try and abstain. They go for inpatient rehab where they give them medications which themselves are addictive, to help withdrawal. That’s the thalium, diazepam or Librium, xanax, and generally it’s the main way that alcoholism is dealt with, but there are new methods. According to Dr. Mark Willington of the National Institute of Alcoholic Abuse in Washington, DC, alcoholism may have a Prozac moment because now we have new medication that can help remove the craving for the first time. David Sinclair, an American researcher who went to the best laboratory in the world for studying alcoholism, and this was run by the government of Finland using National Public Health Institute in Finland. They had tremendous amount of funds derived from taxes on alcohol to try and find a solution. They had bred special high drinking rats that liked alcohol. That’s why Sinclair went there because they had these rats, and another group that were bred that were not susceptible to alcoholism, and that’s one of the reasons he went there because it has animal models to start with. Eventually, it ended up being applied to humans, real humans with great success, but that was one of the things that drew him from the United States to Finland. This goes back from the beginning with his first work at the University of Oregon and in Cincinnati. It’s a forty year effort. Very few scientists get to see their work actually put into practice. The work goes back a long time. There’s lots and lots of research, hundreds of papers published in medical journals, and it’s now being taken.

Chris: So, the person continues to drink and they take the Naltrexon.

Roy: That’s correct. Naltrexon is only effective if the individual drinks at the same time. If the Naltrexon is given with abstinence with instructions to abstain, the individual can take until the cows come home, and there will be no effect. This is seen in animals. The rats for example were drinking at high levels. If you give them the medication and don’t allow them access to the medication, drinking and medication, once you finish that part of the experiment, they are given access to alcohol, and they finish drinking. They drink up to eighteen times more than they would originally, which is what is done with people. Now, often they’re just either thrown in jail or put in a rehab, or they abstain for their own position and the craving goes, and as soon as they have access, they binge drink. There’s not been a way to remove it until they come up with the Sinclair method. It’s sort of counter-intuitive. People are not continuing to drink in the normal manner. They’re continuing to drink while taking this medication that blocks endorphins in the brain. Naltrexon blocks the endorphins, and this prevent reward from the endorphins that are released as a result of drinking, and slowly but surely because there’s a prevention of the reward, the system weakens. It cuts back. The wiring is cut so that eventually the person is restored back to their original state, and say stop probing and they stop fussing and stop thinking about alcohol. This has been measured on scales. The number of drinks go down. Long term studies show for example, a study in Finland called a few double blind placebo controlled study, which was a gold standard in time, and after three years of treatment of patients that were taking an average of nine drinks a week or no more than 1.5 drinks on a drinking occasion, this is a very profound thing. All were able to abstain. Many said, “I’ve had such a problem with alcohol, why should I drink again?” There was a golden rule through all of this. The patient always has to take this medication if they are ever going to drink in the future. If they’re drinking everyday, they take this medication. If they drink once a year, they just take it once a year. The addiction can be relearned, reacquired if they start drinking again without the medicine. Discontinue the addiction, remove it and that’s ninety percent of the battle. People may have emotional and psychological problems as result as their excessive drinking, but unless you can fix the problem in the body and in the brain, you can’t get rid of the addiction. It’s a terrible thing for people. They’re unable to stop, and as you said earlier families are broken, and often people don’t come forward for treatment. They’re afraid they will fail. They’ve seen so many others have been in and out of rehab, and they don’t want to have to wear this label, “alcoholic,” which is very stigmatized and so full of shame. With this treatment, people don’t have to do it. They don’t have to wear a label.

Chris: And, with traditional treatment, not to mention the expense which for many people is out of their reach.

Roy: It can be at some of the rather fancy rehab up to $40,000 per treatment, for 28 days. Essentially what Sinclair talks about is something called the D method. He says, “First you have to detect what’s going on. So that means you have to diagnose the patient, and there’s a lot of stigma associated with wearing that label.” Then, you have to delay. Delay means you have to finally admit, “I’m an alcoholic,” and you have to wait for an opening to enter a rehab program, and that may take several months. You then have to tell your boss, “I’m going away for a month.” Where are you going? “I’m going not to a resort but for rehab. Will my job still be waiting?” Then, there’s a whole question of detox. People often have to go to detox which can be very painful and uncomfortable, can even be fatal, and rapid detox can destroy the brain cells. They’re given medicine early – Diazepam, Librium, a whole range of things, and these medicines themselves can become addictive. You have to keep them in a place where it couldn’t be possible to drink, and they’re instructed the hardest thing, “Don’t drink.” That’s the hardest thing you can say to an alcoholic, “Don’t drink because after all that’s what defines them. They’re unable to stop. They’ve lost control.” Often in these treatments, it’s quite hard. They’re denigrated. Sometimes, they’re given a medication called difalferane for antibute. This is a medicine that you take in tablets or it could be implanted. When you take this medicine and you drink, it gives you terrible nausea and you throw up. Studies also show that it is ineffective, and actually agonizing and can cause death. Traditional rehab is very expensive. With the Sinclair method, there is no detection, no delay, no difalferane, no denigration because patients are treated with dignity, and there’s no revolving door. They don’t have to keep coming back. It pretty much works the first time around for eighty percent of patients. In animals, it’s a hundred percent effective, but humans are not animals given the way rats are in laboratory conditions. There’s eighty percent previous unheard of in addiction medicine. People are thinking about five percent of people who go to Alcoholics Anonymous officially is this rate and up to fifteen percent. There are other claims of thirty percent to forty percent, but these are not very substantiated. Often these claims are made by people who are in the $6.2 billion rehabilitation industry. They don’t address the issue of continued care. The alcoholic in the morning might crave and maybe for a day or two, but then it may become overwhelming with the treatment. They pass a favorite bar. They see a favorite bucket of wine, hundreds of triggers, and they’re unable to resist the urge overwhelming just like being in the desert with water when you haven’t had it in three days. When they do have that first one or two drinks, they drink heavily. They relapse is terrible, but with the Sinclair method, where there’s no more reward from the alcohol, from the endorphins that are released, the craving goes away. It’s as if they were eighteen years old, or 21 years old before they had learned the addiction.

Chris: So, if people want to find out more about the cure for alcoholism, Dr. Eskapa, where can they go?

Roy: Where their website from which they can download several checklists from the book, and checklist for case history, the checklist for medical professionals on prescribing the medication, and it’s simply TheCureForAlcoholism.com. They can also look up on the internet the Sinclair Method. It’s in Wikipedia. There’s quite a bit about it now. There are also clinical trials that are listed on the website that they can download. There’s quite a lot of information including a forum that we have started here in the United States, and the forum website is TheSinclairMethod.com. People are talking and discussing about what’s happening in them. Many of them have been through traditional rehab and have found this somewhere at the beginning stage it’s done very well already, and of course, through the book. The book is available on Amazon.com.

Chris: Now, if a person wants to get a hold of the Naltrexon, how do they do that in this country?

Roy: They go to their doctor. Although the medicine is on a very low schedule, it does require a prescription and this is where some people have difficulty. They need to find an understanding and compassionate doctor making further chance to talk to the doctor on how to prescribe the medication, the question of having a good doctor/patient relationship and finding a specific doctor. Some of the patients have been ordering the medication on the internet, but I don’t subscribe that should be done. Properly medical practitioner, in fact, there’s a step in the book which indicates, which shows people how to deal with doctors, how to show them it’s very safe. When medication itself is not abusable, it doesn’t make you high or low. It’s got a very kind of thick profile. One of the side effects initially for some patients in nausea, and there are ways around that by starting out taking half the dose two or three times, and letting the body adapt to it. For more interviews like this, go to Michael Senoff’s

Chris: Now, are there some people who can’t go this route?

Roy: Of course, not in the case of pregnant women. It’s not in the cases of people who are already dependent who are addicted to opiates such as morphine or heroine. If they take this medication and they are morphine addicts, it could put them into withdrawal, but there are adequate warnings about this. If you or I took this medicine now, we wouldn’t feel anything. We wouldn’t feel high or low. It may, if we had a drink and if we’re not alcoholics, block what might call the first drink affect. That’s the sort of nice fuzzy feeling that non-alcoholic drinkers get with their first drink, but other than that, it’s very sort of inert in the body. Again, most important thing is that the medication itself has no active power. It is only activated in combination with drinking, and this is called Pharmacological extinction, one of Sinclair’s great contributions. This came originally from the work of Pavlov, on learning and extinction in dogs. So, it’s a very, very powerful thing, and it’s wonderful to see the patients regain control of their drinking. I worked in rural India among the rural poor who were given this treatment, and we went to remote villages and made the wives and – it’s usually men who have a problem out there. This is in north India, in remote villages amongst the wives and the mothers and the families of alcoholics, and there was just tremendous joys that the addiction had abated and gone away. Of course, there the medication cost a dollar a tablet. That’s not very expensive for us in the west, but for them earning two or three dollars a day, it’s quite difficult to pay for it, and the danger there is if they start drinking again without the medication, the addiction recurs again. as long as you have access to the medication and follow the golden rule of always take the medication before you drink, then you will not reacquire the addiction.

Chris: Dr. Eskapa, you have some wonderful stories in The Cure for Alcoholism in your book about some families that you have dealt with over the years. I was wonder if you could share that with our listeners.

Roy: I can think of two cases. One involved quite intensive therapy. This is called Julia’s Story of the Better Woman. She had a tremendous problem with alcohol. She had a lovely family. She was a porter. Her husband was well off. They were doing very well, and she started to drink well into their marriage. The daughter would notice that she would go for parties and always get drunk, and eventually she stopped her partying and all she could do was crave alcohol, and there was divorce possibilities, until they heard about the Sinclair Method. Julia was very afraid of going into a hospital for treatment. She wanted nothing to do with doctors. In fact, she was told she definitely had to stop drinking. She doesn’t have to be hospitalized. All she needs to do is take this medication, and she called a psychiatrist who prescribed it for, and made sure that her liver was in good shape, and then she worked with the psychologist on a very intensive regular basis. She had lots of meetings and contact with the doctors. Near the end, she decided to stop drinking, completely started to stop drinking and this is one of those cases. The marriage was saved. The family was very happy, but that was intensive with lots of contact. You don’t have to have that much expensive contact with professionals. There was another case that I treated called Richard’s Story which I describe succinctly like method, same success but less intensive. In fact, that was a patient who I met who was getting up at three o’clock in the morning to drink, or else he would have ill effects, and it completely lost control. He had been to Alcoholics Anonymous. He tried everything, religious, the addiction was a sore in his brain. What we did in this case was I explained to him and his wife how the treatment worked, and they said they’d like to try it, and they went to their general practitioner. The general practitioner gave him a prescription, talked to me on the phone and said as long as I was with him. I did this case by telephone. I’ve seen this sort of patient twice, and he managed to get to be friends with the pharmacist who subscribed this medication and he started the treatment and initially he was drinking at high levels, but the drinking and the craving went down. He was drinking more than a hundred units a week, a very, very high amount of alcohol. After four months, his drinking was down to very safe limits. He decided that he was going to continue drinking, but always with the medication. I saw him and by the end of the treatment, he was wearing a little locket around his neck, and inside the locket he had his medication. He insisted never drink without his medication again. It was a wonderful story. Well, the thing is here, also that you’ve got a way to do it extensively with lots of contact, lots of extensive therapy sessions, or you can do it inextensively with much less contact, much less counseling, and this was shown also by the American Medical Association when they published Project Combine, which is the largest trial ever on alcoholism using various methods including the use of Naltrexon. You don’t have to have such intensive therapy. Of course, this is a bit of a threat to the rehabilitation industry because look what happened to all these addiction counselors and addiction meds and doctors’ jobs, if all you need is to go to a general practitioner or family practitioner, get a prescription for Naltrexon, go off and simply carry on drinking as he would normally would, but with the proviso now he’s added in Naltrexon so that it has blocked the reward coming from the endorphins that are released by alcohol in the brain. Again, it’s not a magic clue. It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. The person doesn’t consciously feel the addiction happening in their body, but one might look over a month, over two months, over three months, they can clearly see, at least they’re likely to see some people are clearly (inaudible), but clearly see my drinking is gone, my craving is gone, and I feel a whole lot better. My wife or my husband is happier. My kids are happier, and there’s no stigma, and I don’t have to go to meetings everyday. I don’t have to deal with ongoing cravings. Cravings can be like the weather. It can be two days for the alcoholic to have them, but then you can have a sudden storm that overtakes you. One day my hope is that this medication will become an over the counter medication without the need for prescription. In fact, there’s every chance that in the future, the new medication Nalmicin, new meaning (inaudible) Naltrexon will become over the country, but in years to come, and we will one day look back upon the way that we feed the addiction particularly to alcohol. So, we were very primitive the way we now look upon the way we treat (inaudible) causing patients. Today, these kinds of effect is we have very good medication and a very good medical way of dealing with it. Alcoholism is many things, but one of the things that it could be is a medical condition, and that medical condition has a medical answer to the Sinclair Method, Naltrexon plus drinking gets a cure. On the other hand, this is a very important point. If you are prescribed Naltrexon with abstinence, it doesn’t work. This was shown in studies in Yale, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine for the year 2000, where they took 620 veterans administration alcoholics and said to them, “Take this medicine, and don’t drink. Go to AA. Go to abstinence, however you can, don’t drink.” After two months, they had a look at what happened, and the patients, there was no change in their craving. At which they stopped taking the medication and relapsed, and the conclusion came about that unfortunately Naltrexon is ineffective. This was because the study was done incorrectly. We now know of course polio vaccines work to prevent polio, but if you give a vaccine after the patient has contracted polio, it’s ineffective. It doesn’t work. If you were to look at the study done that way, you’d say, “Well, the polio vaccine is useless. You don’t want to use it,” and this is what happened with that study in the New England Journal of Medicine. It got noticed and therefore people said, “We don’t believe the Naltrexon works.” There’s a lobby which doesn’t believe that you can treat so called chemical addictions with chemicals, and this is an ideology, and we need to overcome this. One of the alternatives, because very few people come forward for treatment of the eighteen million, maybe two million come forward every year, maybe sometimes three million, but that means there are fifteen million people who are left untreated. They’re driving under the influence of alcohol. They are getting involved with crime. It counts for a huge proportion of violent crime is alcohol related, massive problem, just not in the United States, but worldwide. I said earlier alcohol claims 1.8 million lives every year worldwide. To put that in perspective, HIV AIDS according to WHO, takes three million lives. So, it’s a big thing. It’s also a huge drain on society particularly now with the recession that’s going on. America doesn’t have $197 billion to spend on addictive drinking, accidents, hospitals, cancers are caused, heart disease.

Chris: Dr. Eskapa, what I’m wondering too though is why isn’t the Sinclair Method more widely available to people? Why haven’t we heard more about it?

Roy: That’s a good question, and in fact, that’s one thing that my publisher asked and with a chapter, chapter four, why haven’t I have already heard of the Sinclair Method? He sort of come up with some ideas as to why. One of the ideas is that there are commercial invested interests. If this medication were patented, you can be sure it would have received advertising. The drug companies, the pharmaceuticals spend millions on advertising, but they’re not going to advertise a drug or medication that they don’t have a proprietary right to. The other thing is that people tend to think of medications as they take them passively if you have high blood pressure, you take a medicine for it. You don’t have to do anything. If you have a headache, take a pain killer. You don’t have to actively do something. There was confusion about Naltrexon being an anti-craving medication that all you have to do is take the medicine, and that’s what the fix is. This medicine is ineffective taken that way. It only becomes active and it becomes gradually active, but powerfully active if combined with ongoing drinking. Another reason why we don’t know, information overload – every month, literally thousands of studies are published in medical journals, far way too many for doctors to come to and assist you. So, one of the other reasons why to get the information across. That’s one of the reasons why the book was written. Those are some of the big things. The other thing is change the whole system, there’s an infrastructure the way alcoholism is treated in America is already established. There are rehab hospitals. There’s Alcoholics Anonymous, the twelve steps. There are also non-Alcoholic Anonymous approaches, and these are all 113 ways, so to change the funding is a difficult thing. You can’t get funding yet for the Sinclair Method, although that will come as patients demand it themselves, more and more. There’s seventy clinical trials that proves it, but in medical history, there’s been lots of cases where it’s taken a long time. It’s sort of counter intuitive that if you give a little bit of illness as in vaccination, accumulated virus, for example, proven in small pox. You give a little bit of toxin, you prevent it. Nobody wanted to use it. They’re scared of it. It took William Harvey a hundred years for people to believe their circulation was caused by the action of the pumping heart. The other thing I mentioned earlier in the 1700s was rejected the vaccine. Nobody wanted to take vaccinations. Now, vaccinations against disease is repeated around the world. (inaudible), for example in the 1800s, that was a great revolution in America for a time, but people didn’t believe that Gangrene was caused because doctor’s didn’t wash their hands and sterilize surgical instruments. Now, every hospital is immaculate, or should be immaculately sterile. Louis Pasteur, we boil milk now. We heat it up to destroy bacteria in milk that can cause TB. He also came up with a vaccination against rabies. It took him a long time in the 1800s, about ten years around the French countryside showing that his vaccine worked against rabies. The farmers did not want to have their animals, their livestock vaccinated, but he demonstrated, he showed this group are protected, and that group is not. It takes time for the world to adopt the practice. There’s a whole infrastructure in the US, and not just the US, the UK, all over the world, there’s a way that people assume that addiction should be treated, and that assumption has to change to save lives.

Chris: You also mentioned other addictions and how this drug has been helpful for those.

Roy: Yes, we know for certain that it’s effective for alcohol, but it also the principle that Sinclair discovered, the pharmacological extinction is you can apply this principle to other addictions – substance addictions and non-substance addictions. For example, at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, that’s the institute that awards the Nobel Prize, there was recently a very, very profound study, again double blind placebo controlled, on the use of Naltrexon for amphetamine, that’s speed or methamphetamine, which is a big problem in Sweden and here, too, and in my country of South Africa. People take this drug because it’s cheap. It’s sort of a cheap cocaine, a cheap high. If you give Naltrexon or Nalmaphine, the new medication, but this study was done with Naltrexon, to patients who are addicted to amphetamines, they’re craving comes down in the same way. More studies need to be done. There was a study done at the University of Texas on cocaine. The same thing, not just with animals and rats, but in humans. They stopped craving cocaine. Then, there are non-substance addictions, for example, gambling, the American Gaming Association funding the study, and they showed the seventy (inaudible) success if patients were given Naltrexon. They used a slightly higher dose than is usually given for alcoholism. This is because when people gamble, there’s a kind of rush or release of endorphins in the brain, whether they lose or whether they win, but you can extinguish this as well. High risk behavior, eating disorders like bulimia, these have to be handled under careful medical attention, and of course opiate addiction – morphine. This is an illegal substance, but you can’t tell people, “Don’t take heroine or morphine,” but they can be switched onto methadone, and from methadone you can then give them Naltrexon in a very careful monitored way, and extinguish their craving, remove the addiction. There are other medications that may work for nicotine, but this medicine Naltrexon is generally not effective for nicotine. The new application will be with the short acting form of Naltrexon called Naloxon in a special way, a special delivery, and this will be excellent for weight control for sweets. In sweets, there’s a release of endorphins. Part of survival, when a baby is on the mother’s breast and tastes milk, they can’t wait for the blood glucose levels to rise. There’s a release of endorphin in the brain, and that sort of tells the baby, eat more it’s good for you. Eating sweet treats rather than unwrapped food, if you have something sweet in your mouth, it releases endorphins which is a signal for survival, do more of this. This is just beginning, but we know certainly that it works for alcohol in the majority of the people. Willpower is wonderful. I want to make this point, and this is an important point. Some people are able to stop just like that. One in a ten are told by their doctor, “You’re doing damage to your liver. Stop drinking,” and they just stop like that. Someone’s spouse will say, “I’m leaving you,” and they stop drinking. The other point that needs to be made clearly is that today people who are doing well with abstinence, such as Alcoholics Anonymous or one of these other abstinence based methods, this treatment is not for them. Hats off to you. Keep doing what you are doing. This is not meant to dupe you into thinking that it’s a license for you to start drinking again. This is only for those people who are currently drinking and need to detox slowly while taking the medication. So, they start taking the medication, and they drink less and they crave less. That’s for those who are doing well, and not going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and are doing well with it. The Sinclair Method is not for you. You don’t need it. It’s for those people who have trouble remaining abstinent. The idea also is that it’s cost effective. It doesn’t have to cost a lot. It doesn’t have to require such intensive care. You don’t have to go to a hospital to rehab or be admitted, pay professionals a fortune. It can be managed with limited intervention. You do need intervention. You do need care, the care of a doctor, maybe even a counselor if you could ask him to see how you’re getting along. It’s important to be keeping a record both of the drinking and the craving, and it’s very useful to have somebody hold your hand and guide you along, but it’s not an absolute necessity. Again, this was established and shown in the larger clinical trials, probably combined published in 2006 by the American Medical Association’s Journal.

Chris: Dr. Eskapa, can you mention your website one more time for our listeners that are interested in finding more about The Cure of Alcoholism?

Roy: Okay, the website from where they can download chapters, and they have to click on “About the Book,” is called TheCureForAlcoholism.com. There is a forum on the internet, and it’s called TheSinclairMethod.com.

Chris: Dr. Eskapa, we want to thank you once again.

Roy: Thank you very much. We need to get the word out there and start saving lives. Thank you, much appreciated.

Chris: That’s the end of our interview, and I hope you’ve enjoyed. For more great health related interviews, go to Michael Senoff’s