Nancy -- thanks for checking my faulty memory on this.  It must be some other NIAAA document I'm remembering.
     Your from-the-Hill view of the third report is interesting.  At what was then still the Social Research Group (later Alcohol Research Group) in Berkeley, we had a semi-insiders' view from the perspective of selling our services as researchers to NIAAA.  In the Nixon era, emphasis had shifted from grant research toward contract research, and we were pushed increasingly into the world of contract research by this.  We found it difficult to do good work within the time and money constraints of contracts, and, as Ron Roizen put it at the time, we "staggered across the finish line" in being able to shift back to a grants base when we were awarded one of the first round of national alcohol research center grants in late 1977.
    The major contract on which we worked in 1977/78 was a kind of task-order contract mostly connected with producing raw materials for Alcohol and Health 3.  There were eventually, as I remember, eight different tasks.  One of them, the monster, was a review of the epidemiological and related literatures on alcohol's roles in casualties and crime.  It was a huge task, at least as we defined it, and we worked on it intensely -- among the project's results, we joked grimly at its end, were two divorces and one marriage.  We produced a 300-page-or-so report for A&H (eventually a 700+-page final report, with 2000+ pages of appendices), and proved incapapble of boiling it down farther -- NIAAA staff eventually enlisted Betsy Parker to boil it down to 40 pages, and she did a good job.  We also did the draft of the prevention chapter (well, I did it, actually), as well as some other bits.  The report, in fact, was the high-water mark of our influence at NIAAA. 
    But the report was clearly a debacle, even from the perspective we had on events.  The draft report was seen as too long, complicated and learned for Capitol Hill, and in the end what was intended as the Press Kit for the report became the report itself, with the original report eventually being published as the "Technical Support Document".  I think we heard that this then resulted in some political criticism of the report as lacking scientific documentation (which a press kit obviously would not have).  What was seen as the debacle of the report resulted in a convulsive change within NIAAA, as the new head of research,Gian-Carlo Salmoiraghi, saw his opportunity to kill off any competing center of research competence within the Institute.  Lee Towle's small policy analysis group within the Director's office, which had coordinated the prepartion of A&H3, was dismantled -- in my view a real weakening of the Institute's capability in policy-related research.  Lee was essentially given a broom-closet and a peripheral task -- director of international and intergovernmental relations.  As an intelligent and committed manager, he then proceeded to make something useful and productive of this task -- the alcohol program at the World Health Organization in Geneva, starting in the late 1970s, was largely made possible by his efforts in getting and managing NIAAA funding for the program.  But that's a whole other story.
    In those days what became the Alcohol Research Group was pretty invisible to the media and political process.  None of us ever had contact with any congressional committees or staff then, and only a few contacts even much later (whereas I had not been in Sweden six months before I was asked to testify to a parliamentary committee hearing attended by all 17 members of the committee! In my time in Canada, also, I did much more testifying to provincial and federal legislative committees than I was ever asked to do in the U.S.)   Ron Roizen and I used to joke to each other, in those days, that the more the American public knew about us, the less they would like it.  We knew much of what we had to say was potentially upsetting to the "enlightened" orthodoxy of the alcoholism movement (and of course, as young turks, rather relished that).  And I was the only US-based author of the 1975 book by Kettil Bruun et al., Alcohol Control Policies in Public Health Perspective -- a book which made quite an impression on Noble, and provided the intellectual stiffening for his attention to the overall level of alcohol consumption as a matter for public concern.  This, of course, the alcoholic beverage industries REALLY didn't like -- even we heard about that.
    So it is not only in terms of my historical interests, but also in a kind of home-movie frame, that I would love to hear more about what exactly the alcoholism movement and the beverage industries didn't like about A&H3, and what you can tell us about how Ernie Noble got fired, and what A&H3 had to do with this.  Cheers, Robin


-----Original Message-----
From: Nancy Olson <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: den 6 februari 2000 11:51
Subject: Re: How many alcoholics?


>In a message dated 2/6/00 3:18:20 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>[log in to unmask] writes:
>
>> Nancy --
>>      Maybe the distinction I am remembering was in a later Alcohol and
>Health
>> -- no. 3?? (which I don't have here.)  Incidentally, I looked at the 4th
>and
>> 5th, and at that time NIAAA bought in surprisingly much to the kind of "it
>> depends what you mean, there's no single figure" line which us
>> epidemiological sociologists were comfortable with.  Robin
>
>Robin, I've taken a look at the third report which says:
>
>"There are an estimated 9.3 to 10 million problem drinkers (including
>alcoholics) in the adult population -- 7 percent of the 145 million adults
>(18 and over). ... In addition to adult problem drinkers, there are an
>estimated 3.3 million problem drinkers among youth in the 14 to 17 age range
>-- 19 percent of the 17 million persons in this age group.  (Youth problem
>drinking is defined differently than for adults because youth problems tend
>to be acute rather than chronic.)"
>
>I still don't find the distinction.
>
>(It was interesting glancing again through the third report.  It is the one
>which created so much hostility from not only the industry but from the
>alcoholism organizations as well, and ended with Ernie Noble being fired.)
>
>Nancy