An elevator door crushed his hand and he went back inside twice to use before he let the ambulance take him. Peter E. on six months sleeping on the 4 train.

He chose vodka because it left no smell, and his wife says she never suspected. Andrew S. on the double life that cost him the marriage and the house.

At seven she drank the sweet wine left in everyone’s Passover glasses and felt the knot in her stomach go. It took Heidi Z. until 42 to say the word aloud.

He found out the liquor store delivered. Then he slurred so badly the clerk kept hanging up on him. Ernie D. on quitting pills and finding the bar instead.

She was deliberately awful to the caseworker who kept calling anyway. Tonie D. on the years she was a dollar sign, and why drugs were the small part of it.

His sister told him she still did not trust him and might not pick up the phone. So he called every week until she did. Michael C. is a family therapist now.

He went to his first meeting at 22 and spent years deciding he had overreacted. Griffin House on 200 nights a year in bars, and the date that finally held.

His sister drove him two hours to treatment and looked away while he finished the bottle in the back seat. It took Michael several more tries after that one.

At 39 a nurse refused to send him home and he was in surgery within the hour. Lucky Church on the eating and drinking he never counted as an addiction.

The man who finally got her off the street was the officer serving her warrants. Alison V. on five months in a cell and the judge who sent her to treatment.

She had a criminology degree and a law firm job when she found a bag in her boyfriend’s room and snorted it alone, hoping it would help her understand him.

He turned up at a meeting in Georgia freshly beaten up. A stranger said it did not look like he won, asked if he could go one day dry, and stayed with him.

His wife told him to leave and not come back until he stopped. The counselor he phoned said go to three meetings first. John S. has not drunk since 1990.

She woke from a blackout having deleted her family from her phone. Days later her mother and sisters were in her living room with a stranger named Bob.

Wine and water at seven, her first hangover at thirteen, and years of blaming herself for something that was never her fault. Christine D. on the drinking that followed.

Arrested the Friday before his high school graduation, he later picked litter out of Washington Square Park in a vest between NYU classes. Sober at 26.

Seven years on a maintenance script she left off every medical form, Adderall by the handful, a job at the mall. Then her boyfriend arranged the intervention.

Sherri’s neighbors watched police take her off her own front lawn. Marguerite went thirty years dry, then one glass of wine undid it. They met in rehab.

Busted drinking his second night of college, drunk again two weeks out of his first program. Then a bank teller called his father instead of the police.

His last drink came after a school play where nobody said his name. He woke in a county jail and said out loud, for the first time, that he was an alcoholic.