Cravings - Is the genetic alcoholism really alcoholism? Or is it genetic addiction?

[novaclay]

Weasel=high, if you don't wanna read anything more then the question it's in bold below.

My weasel is pretty high right now and tried a few various different approaches with the search engine to try and find an answer to his brand new, "epiphany", with no luck.
He hopes he hasn't put this thread in the wrong place, as he thought about putting it in the some for all section, but anyway, enough blabber, here it is.

My weasel's family has a history of alcoholism, but most of his family are catholic, or some other form of christian, or in some way religious, or otherwise against drugs, be it from media, society or whatever.

The weasel however, has had his times as being what you could consider an alcoholic, with binge drinking almost every night for 5 months, spending 3/4 of his paycheck a month at a bar, (a bar with very very cheap drinks by the way), and when he says almost every night he means the record for nights sober in a row for that time period was 3, and that happened twice, and when he wasn't sober he wasn't just a couple beers in, he was at least 6 shots and 3 beers in.

But the weasel gets temporarily addicted to many things at different time periods. One month it will be world of warcraft, the next month it will be getting shit faced, the next month it will be making t-shirts, etc.
So recently the weasel has been trying out legal highs like spice and kratom, and from tonight's experience thinks he may be temporarily addicted to these, but is sure that within a month or less he won't be.
((Yes he understands kratom is very addicting but hasn't taken any tonight, nor does he have any on hand)) **he also assumes this spice is pretty addicting**

Here's the question, and weasel knows he's way high and talking a lot, and apologizes:

Weasel wants to know if what doctors consider genetic "alcoholism" (whatever is passed down from generation to generation to make a person more liable to become an alcoholic) is actual specific for alcohol, or is it more correctly a tendency to become addicted to things, or possibly only to mind altering things?

He thinks this might be the case because for the most part, he believes his family is addicted to alcohol, not because they believe it's their favorite drug, but because everything else is illegal, meaning they haven't tried other things (or on a few occasions pot, but later decided they were just young and stupid) so of course they would choose liquor!

Any thoughts on the subject, or another thread related to this (and again weasel does apologize if it exists) would be greatly appreciated.

And anyone else with thoughts like these, share them and it would be a pleasure for my weasel to read them!