Alcoholism was never in my plans, never my projected career path. My CV wasn't supposed to read academic, and then chronic alcoholic. It was never in the dreams of a better future. For a long time I couldn't acknowledge it had occupied the present. Yet there it was. There it is.

In a 2003 survey, the charity Turning Point found that 3.8 million people in the UK were addicted to alcohol. But if the survey were to include those hurt by addiction to alcohol, the numbers would at least double, to include wives, husbands, parents, children, friends, victims. Again, for every two or three alcoholics still actively using drink, there is going to be another alcoholic who has quit - no less an addict, but mercifully, today, in recovery. Further, alcoholism is only one form of addictive behaviour that includes the abuse of hard drugs, anorexia and bulimia. Six million, then? Ten?

The problem is that you can't cure addiction by statistics. There is no "cure". When I was using alcohol, I could no more count statistics, nor units of consumption, any more than a river knows how many cubic litres of water it is carrying to the sea, or how many pebbles there are on its stream bed. All I cared about was continuing the stricken relationship with ethanol. I drank because drinking was one of the many things I did. Later, I drank because drinking was one thing I thought I could do. In the end, I drank because drinking was what I had become.

I don't think that, despite having a circle of friends - people whose friendship I would have claimed to value - I was much good at making stable, warm, non-dependent friendships in the drinking years. Nevertheless, alcohol allowed me to maintain some friendships through mutual illusion. But over a drinking career spanning 25 years, it was alcohol itself that became the friend. It can't be repeated too often that alcohol, however it is packaged and advertised, gets you pissed.

Alcohol invariably does what it says on the label. It does it quickly. It does it at five in the morning and 11 at night. It is always there for you. It will dress you in your illusions and put you to bed unconscious. It will never tell you that there are any consequences to your actions. In its company, you are allowed to become whatever you need, at that moment, to be. In this emotional landscape, addiction has a remorseless, terrible kind of logic.

It was the deepest relationship I have ever made. That helps to explain why I was so baffled when eventually I couldn't drink without being profoundly ill. Having developed an earlier tolerance to the drug that helped me feel normal, in the end I couldn't do two bottles of light beer without suffering hangover-like symptoms of nausea, clamminess and shaking. It was only later that I learned there is a phrase for this: reverse tolerance. In reverse tolerance, your physiology reacts with violence to even a touch of the drug that is poisoning it. Yet this drug was your ally, your closest friend. It took me nearly three years - years of treatment, of bafflement, of fear - to realise that this relationship would kill me, sooner rather than later.

Alcohol takes everything. Marriages, jobs, mortgages. That is for starters. Then it takes reputation, and sanity. Your only response to these disasters will be to drink.

Let me transpose that from the safe realm of the second person. In 1994, my first marriage collapsed. Later the same year there was a bereavement. My response to these crises, and such loneliness, was to do more of something I had always done to excess. I drank. In 1995 and 1996, at least partly - I thought - to recover some sort of life, I made more difficult, inappropriate and addictive relationships. When those ended, my response was again to drink. In 1997 I was diagnosed for the first time as a chronic alcoholic, and underwent detoxification. Three months later, I drank again. One consultant warned me that if I carried on working and drinking that way, "First you won't be able to walk. Then you won't be able to think." I asked him how long he thought I had. "The way you're going, six months," he said. He also diagnosed the onset of peripheral neuropathy, a condition which signals that your central nervous system is being damaged by ethanol. The numbness began in my left big toe, and spread slowly upwards. I was so alarmed by the consultant's warnings, and also, deep down, so moved by his concern, that I did what I knew how to do. What does any alcoholic do with fear, or with the feelings he or she professes to despise? Right.

At the beginning of 1998 I had no money left, despite being in salaried employment. I sold the house, and moved to a rented flat. I drank, detoxed again, and spent the next 18 months in the no-man's-land of sporadic, chaotic drinking. Friends left, disgusted. One night I was arrested for drink-driving, banned for three years, and sentenced to a fine and community service. I dried out then, temporarily. But in 1999 I was drinking again, and moved once more, this time to nowhere. I ended up spending millennium night in a private clinic, where I underwent detox for the third time. I also undertook treatment and counselling with the group of drunks and junkies who had inherited each other. That, and the aftercare provided by the clinic, made a life-saving difference.

I have now been in recovery for just over four and a half years, years of radical change and reconstruction. I rarely count the days. In the end, the choice was simple. Living the choice, in recovery, turned out to be difficult and often complicated, but I made the choices in the company of others who were doing the same. That made a difference, too.

If I want to remember almost the worst of how it was, I think back to the time when a cab driver pulled me out of the back of his car and punched me, knocking me to the pavement. I didn't feel a thing. I was so estranged from myself, so disoriented and lost, that I hadn't been able to remember my own address. For some reason, after he had landed his blow, the cab driver was polite, even gentle, picking me up and dusting me down. "Sorry, mate. It's just that ... " I know. They don't tell you, you see, and you're too tired and sick to want to find out - about blackouts, the central nervous system, peripheral neuropathy, the "gloves and stockings" effect, diabetes. You just think it's going to be your liver. But alcohol affects everything in your body. It works there like poisoned memory. They don't tell you about Wernicke's syndrome or Korsakoff's psychosis - the conditions that are inaccurately, but picturesquely, called "wet brain". But all that is part of alcoholism, too, as is suicide, not knowing where you live and death.

Detox can save, and recovery is possible. But once you have quit, for a month, a couple of months, to stay with recovery you need a programme, friends, contact, communication. You need conviction, too, if only to ignore the chorus of pissed voices that tell you that you have become boring, no fun any more, we preferred you when you were ...

There are those around you who genuinely want you to recover, to live your life differently. There will also be those who want you to recover, but who will be unwilling or unable to make any accommodations to your recovery themselves. Well, why should they?

I was lucky to have the professional skill of the community detox teams who nursed me twice through the hallucinations and the shakes. They are so underfunded that I have no idea how, or even if, they are paid. In the end, I was lucky to have access, via a loan, to a private hospital whose care I thought I could never afford. What grieves me is the thought that few people have access to such private treatment for alcoholism. There is also the fact that treatment policy in the UK seems geared to "drugs". "Drugs" are high profile; "drugs" are news; "drugs" provide soundbites for the politicians who are ordaining the destinations of your tax and NI contributions. Meanwhile, the chancellor nets billions from taxes on alcohol - a class-A drug just as lethal as heroin.

There is no cure, but there is healing from addiction, there is daily management and there is hope. Much is possible in this benign remission, which begins with acknowledging the chaos that is yourself. Get to that point, and you realise with a shock of something like compassion that there are at least four million other people out there, all of them just like you.

· Goodbye, Mr. Wonderful: Alcoholism, Addiction, and Early Recovery by Chris McCully is published by Jessica Kingsley, priced £13.99.