No. Georgia’s habitual intoxication ground reaches alcohol and nothing else.
The Case That Decided It
Ring v. Ring, 112 Ga. 854 (1901), is the decision. A husband sued for divorce alleging that his wife “was addicted to the habitual and intemperate use of opium in its various forms.” The trial judge charged the jury that a person “may become intoxicated, within the meaning of the Georgia statute, as well by the use of opium and morphine as by the use of whisky,” and the jury granted the divorce.
The Georgia Supreme Court reversed. Giving the word “its plain and ordinary meaning,” the Court held that intoxication “is restricted to drunkenness produced by the excessive use of alcoholic liquors.”
Why the Court Read It That Way
The reasoning is about when the statute was written. “Our statute allowing a divorce for habitual intoxication was enacted in 1850, when the opium habit was comparatively rare in this State, but intoxication from alcoholic liquors was common and generally designated as drunkenness.”
The Court walked through the dictionaries of the day, which treated intoxication and drunkenness as the same word, and concluded that the term “was never meant to include the condition produced by the habitual and excessive use of opiates, or other narcotic drugs.”
What the Legislature Did About It
Ring left Georgia with a real gap: a spouse whose life had been taken over by drugs had no ground that fit. The General Assembly closed it, but not by rewriting the intoxication ground. It added a separate one.
OCGA 19-5-3(12) now makes “[h]abitual drug addiction” its own ground for total divorce. That is why the modern statute lists both, and why the choice of which to plead is not a formality. Plead habitual intoxication for a drug problem and Ring is still the answer you get.
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This post is a quick overview of the law and is not intended as legal advice. Please feel free to contact our office for a consultation if you have questions about this or any other legal aspects regarding your case!