The Compulsion Behind the Drink: Father Peter G. Young on Why “Why?” Is the Wrong Question

Father Peter G. Young spent more than half a century fighting for one idea: addiction is a disease, not a crime and not a character flaw. In this 20-second hook from The Slingin Podcast, he explains why “Why are you drinking?” is the wrong question, and points straight at the part of the brain that keeps people caught.

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Watch: “The Compulsion Behind the Drink: A Deep Dive into Addiction”, 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

“Why are they drinking? That’s a bad question to ask any alcoholic. Because you need it. You have to have that. You have that compulsion.”

Ask an alcoholic why, and you’re asking for a reason. Father Young’s point is that there isn’t one, not in the way people mean it. The compulsion comes first. In the clip he traces it to a response in the mesolimbic area of the brain, the part that “captures you,” until “you’re caught and you can’t escape.” He calls it the ism. Once you see it that way, the question changes from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What does this person need?”

From Sinner to Patient

That shift sounds obvious now. It wasn’t when he started. In his memoir he remembers a time when alcoholics were called bums, drunks, sinners and criminals. Hospitals didn’t want them taking up beds from people who were “really sick.” Society figured all they had to do was stop drinking.

Father Young went the other way. He studied, he taught, and he ran groups with the men in his shelter about two parts of the brain: the cortex, the thinking part, and the mesolimbic area, where the craving comes from. He wanted the men themselves to understand what was happening to them.

He also had a teaching trick he picked up in 1959, when he heard Father Ralph Pfau speak in Schenectady. Pfau set a little toy duck in front of the microphone, and once it got wet it kept dipping back into the glass for the whole hour-plus he spoke. That’s compulsion in a picture. Father Young says he used the toy duck every time he spoke at a high school, and it always got the point across.

Then he took the idea to the Capitol. In his telling, the goal was to take the criminal identity away from alcoholism. The public called it decriminalization. He preferred another word: destigmatization.

From the Memoir

The science and the fight behind this clip run through his memoir Fifty Years Young.

From Chapter 27, “Believing in the Disease,” he explains what the research came to show about the brain he talks about in the clip:

“Addiction happens in part because the limbic area of the brain remembers that pleasure and wants it again and again. Eventually the finely tuned system breaks down.”

In the same chapter he gives the definition he says he has used for sixty years:

“a progressive, insidious disease that builds up a tolerance at the body tissue level”

He also boils it down to four words: disease, difficulties, desperate, dangerous. The disease brings the difficulties, the difficulties make people desperate, and desperation makes them dangerous. That’s why, he writes, they are always in special need of help.

From Chapter 17, “240.40 — Don’t Incarcerate, Rehabilitate,” he traces his education back to the rectory, where the chancery sent priests to dry out. They were good people, he writes, like the men and women in his shelter:

“The craving part of the brain was telling them to feed the disease, and at that time society didn’t understand that. That is what made me want to change the law, so that addiction would be treated as a disease and not a crime.”

Why It Matters Now

“Just stop” is still the first thing a lot of people say to someone who’s struggling. Father Young’s whole career is an answer to that. If the craving lives in the brain, then shame doesn’t fix it, and neither does a cell. In Chapter 27 he names the first challenge plainly: stopping the craving of the mesolimbic area, so the thinking brain can get back some control. And for him, spirituality is the foundation that keeps people from picking up again.

That’s the Legacy: a priest who learned the science so he could defend the people everybody else condemned. The Movement is carrying that understanding into our homes, our blocks and our families. Drop the “why are you drinking” interrogation. Ask what someone needs, and meet them, as he puts it, “where they are.”

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.