[DanielDudley]

You are in no position to help your friend. He is a true alcoholic, and until he is driven to his knees and is willing to go to any lengths to achieve sobriety, he will not recover. Letting him stay at your house at this point would be the wrong thing to do, IMO, and would fall under the category of enabling.

There are basically two types of outside activities that can help an alcoholic to get sober. If an alcoholic experiences a major catastrophic event that is tied to alcoholism, that would be one. The other would be collective peer pressure. You need to understand that a to a true alcoholic having even one drink is like setting the cart before the horse. You don't need to learn this, your friend does.

The reason AA works, is because real alcoholics know what it took to get themselves sober, and they know that there are no half measures. A person's chances of getting sober as an alcoholic are about 1 in 8, and those are pretty poor odds. AA teaches alcoholics to see who they are, and to realize that they must not take that first drink. Alcoholics are powerless over even one drink, and they need to surrender to that fact. Non alcoholics often seem to be unaware of this fact.

You need to throw your friend out, and you can do it in a kindly manner, but any other action will be useless to his recovery. Addicts only change when every other option fails for them. Living in your house and drinking was not an option. Not showing up for work was not an option. Excuses and apologies are not an option.

I have worked with alcoholics for years. People have called me up years after the fact to thank me for firing them, or for refusing to enable them. You want to get him in a program, fine, but you need to get him out of your house.

True story. My dead Ex is dead. Her whole family is dead. Her next husband was an enabler. Her brother's girlfriend bought him the motorcycle on which he killed took his fatal final drunken ride. They were a large family. I shan't go on. If your friend was at a meeting instead of taking ''just one sip'', this might never have happened. But sometimes people just haven't experienced enough pain, suffering and loss to figure out where the problem lies.

I was in way over my head with other people's drinking. You are in way over your head. Everything you need to know or do will be counter intuitive to you. He can still be your friend, but that doesn't mean you should give him a warm place to live while you help him to kill himself.

The more clear the negatives of his situation, the more likely your friend will heed them. He is the one who needs to find that there are only two doors left, Life or Death.

I have seen this a hundred times. How many other people on this board can say that ? Kind actions won't bring the dead back to life for me, but tough love could be what your friend needs to get his life together. I wish it were easier. Do you want to feel good, or do you want to do the one thing that might make an impression ?