Alcoholism: A Vicious Cycle — Father Peter G. Young on the Night Shift That Started It All

Long before addiction had a seat at the policy table, Father Peter G. Young was a parish priest in Albany’s South End, sleeping drunk and sick men on his gym floor because nobody else would take them. In this clip from The Slingin Podcast, he takes you back to those nights and the question that would run his whole life: what makes a good person go off the wall at midnight and sit there sober and sharp the next morning?

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Watch: “Alcoholism: A Vicious Cycle”, Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast, Hoodz Radio.

Father Peter G. Young died on December 9, 2020, at age 90. Kay Bond recorded this conversation with him for The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio.

In His Words

“I found out they had delirium tremens, convulsions, seizures, all of these things going on at night. And the next day they’d be okay. I’d sit down and I’d talk with them the next day and they’d be fine to talk with, intelligent kind of conversation. The night before, they’re off the wall.”

That is the whole cycle in four sentences. At night the drink, or the withdrawal from it, owns the man. In the morning he’s himself again, and he can’t explain what happened. Father Young didn’t start with a theory. He started with what he saw, night after night, and kept asking why. As he puts it in the clip, the answer isn’t about choice: it’s the “ism,” the continual abuse of your body answering the call for another drink or drug.

Night Shift on the Gym Floor

In his telling, it began in the courtroom. Starting in 1959, he served as Albany’s police court chaplain. Every morning about fifty men and women stood before the judge charged with public intoxication, and many of them had nowhere to go. So the priest with a lot of empty parish buildings opened the doors. Men slept on mats on the St. John’s gym floor, and in the coldest weather they slept in the church pews.

Those nights were not quiet. He recalls withdrawal turning into a physical confrontation almost every day, and one man who gave him seventeen stitches. Then the morning would come, and the same men would thank him for helping them. That swing, from the man under the influence to the man sober over coffee, is exactly what he describes in this clip. He didn’t write those men off as bums. He got curious.

Before Albany had a detox of its own, he drove men in withdrawal to anyone who would take them. Many nights that meant Betty Snyder’s place in Saratoga, where paraldehyde was used to calm the DTs, and he says the smell stayed on him all week. Women often went to Margaret and Mickey McPike’s farmhouse in Ballston Spa, with a small bottle of brandy in the car in case someone went into withdrawal on the way.

From the Memoir

Father Young lays out this education in addiction across several chapters of his memoir Fifty Years Young.

From Chapter 10, “Green Street: Brothels, Heroin and Booze,” he describes the work that kept those nights from turning deadly:

“Every night I walked among the cots and mats and turned people onto their sides or stomachs, because a man who is severely intoxicated may not have the strength to bring up his own vomit, and he can choke to death.”

From Chapter 17, “240.40 — Don’t Incarcerate, Rehabilitate,” he names the question at the heart of this clip and where it led him:

“Watching that change, from the man under the influence to the man sober over coffee, I wanted to know what caused it. That question sent me to the Yale School of Alcohol Studies and later to teaching at Rutgers.”

From Chapter 27, “Believing in the Disease,” he shows how the cycle tears a life down piece by piece. He draws clients a ladder of how they fell: first family relationships, then the home, then the job, and finally the old friends. Any one of those losses could be the bottom, he writes, and each one has to be rebuilt one thing at a time.

Why It Matters Now

The cycle Father Young watched on that gym floor hasn’t gone anywhere. The drugs change names, but the pattern is the same: the night that takes over, the morning that can’t explain it, and the losses that stack up until a person is out of family, home, job and friends. Too many people still get treated like the “bums, vagrants” the health authorities dismissed back then.

That’s the Legacy. A priest who looked at people everybody else had given up on and saw somebody worth keeping alive through the night, then went back to school to understand what was hurting them. The Movement is what we do with it now: show up for people in the cycle, stop judging the night by the man you meet in the morning, and help rebuild the ladder one rung at a time. If you’ve been down that ladder yourself, your story is proof it can be climbed.

Watch the full conversation with Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast at HoodzRadio.com, follow Hoodz Radio for more clips, and look out for 50 Years Young, our 10-part series on his life and work.

Respect the Legacy. Amplify the Movement.