Alcohol compared to heroin .. Not much different??

[Divine Moments]

That's exactly what they prescribed morphine for back in the day, treatment of alcoholism.

And they prescribed heroin for morphine addiction. Doesn't mean it worked

 

[Crankinit]

Except it actually did work in a lot of cases. Many of them stopped drinking, which means they stopped destroying their body and they stopped beating their wives and being too drunk to work and all the fun stuff that comes with alcohol. Once you're on a cheap, regular dose, morphine is pretty harmless to the body, so they were basically replacing a destructive drug with a benign one.

 

[Mr Blonde]

I'm no pharmacology expert like others like Mr B and I may make some technical mistakes (forgive me). I think barbs, benzos and booze all work on the same receptors, GABA receptors. Opiates work on my favourite receptors the mu, kappa and delta opiate receptors (mu being the most euphoric). I have always loved for both of these, GABA when I first found alcohol at a young age, and the opiate receptors when I found opiates.

They are both CNS depressants, maybe that's why they're similar to you? It could also be why Mr B stated with that link which I haven't had the time to read.

Nope you are fairly right there, one thing about alcohol though is that it has a wide range of effects on the brain; GABA one of the more important but it has a lot of other effects that add up and complicate the picture of what it does to the brain. It's kind of like a 'shotgun' drug, compared to something like diazepam or barbiturates which are much more targeted to specific receptors and whose effects are largely more easily attributable to specific receptors.