Alcohol's Deadly Triple Threat; Women get addicted faster, seek help less often and are more likely to die from the bottle.

Byline: Karen Springen and Barbara Kantrowitz, With Peg Tyre in New York and Frank Brown in Moscow

Pat Staples's childhood gave birth to the demons that nearly killed her. Her father was a volatile alcoholic. "I was physically, verbally and emotionally abused," she says. "Nose broken, head into the walls." In kindergarten she started dreaming about running away; she finally escaped in 1959, at the age of 20, when she married young to get out of the alcoholic house. But she couldn't flee her past. Over the years she gradually became an addict herself--first with pills and then with alcohol. Still, her life seemed good on the surface. The marriage endured, defying the odds, and she and her husband had two daughters. "Our house was on the home tour," she says. "Our kids were perfect."

The reality was far more bleak. She felt constantly under stress, anxious and terrified. "I was taking pills and drinking to keep it up," she says. Her husband started marking the liquor bottles, but she would just add water so he couldn't tell how much she had drunk. Finally, one day in 1985, Staples went into the kitchen to get more ice for her vodka and saw her younger daughter, Tracy, then a high-school senior, making soup. The sweet smile on Tracy's face triggered something in Staples. "I walked over, and I put my arms around her, and I said, 'Tracy, I need help'." Tracy replied, "I'm so proud of you." A few weeks later, when Staples entered the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California, she was hemorrhaging rectally. "The alcohol had stripped the veins in my stomach," says Staples, now 64. "I would be dead today if I hadn't gotten sober."

Staples's grim assessment echoes new research about the devastating effects of alcohol on women. "Women get addicted faster with less alcohol, and then suffer the consequences more profoundly than men do," says Susan Foster, director of policy research and analysis at the U.S. National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. A single drink for a woman has the impact of two drinks for a man. One reason: women's bodies contain proportionately less water than men's, and a given amount of alcohol produces a higher concentration in the bloodstream. For women, anything more than one drink a day (five ounces of wine or a 12-ounce bottle of beer) is considered risky. The limit for men is two. Women who start drinking young and become heavy drinkers as they age are more vulnerable to a range of major health problems, from infertility to osteoporosis to cancer.

But new evidence about the dangers of alcohol hasn't stopped women from drinking. Researchers say that about 60 percent of American women drink and about 5 percent average two or more drinks a day. In Russia the number of female alcoholics has increased by 14 percent over the past five years, says Nikolai Ivanets, director of Russia's National Center on Addictions. Many female alcoholics keep their drinking a secret for years. Vera Prusakova, a 42-year-old Russian nurse who has been sober for five years but used to go through a liter of vodka ...