Chuck --
My guess is that you are going to have some difficulty finding much. Years
ago (early 1980s), when I spent a few weeks in Geneva, I found some stuff from
the Jellinek era (early 1950s) in the library -- working papers for the
meetings that were held then as a Subcommittee of the Expert Committee on
Mental Health. But in those early days, as I remember, there was no-one
outside Europe and North America involved in the committees, and the later
emphasis on the developing world had not yet arrived.
The WHO library in Geneva is fairly hit or miss on alcohol -- no-one seems
to have been actively collecting, but it has a fair number of books about
alcohol in the developing world which someone has probably sent them at one
time or another.
The responsibility for alcohol at WHO Geneva has had a fairly complicated
institutional history in the last 20 years, and moved around several times (see
web refs. below), as a result of which I suspect the program itself doesn't
have much in the way of old files.
What there would be somewhere would be the register of correspondence coming
to and going from WHO which, until e-mail came along (faxes probably sabotaged
it a bit, too), would have a fairly complete record of all correspondence.
Letters came to the registry first, were stamped in by them, given a code based
on its contents, copied, and then sent on to the addressee. The same for stuff
going out, I think. I presume this is all stored somewhere by code.
Then there are the regional offices. Until recently, the only regional
offices that paid much attention to alcohol were the PAHO/Americas office in
Washington and the WHO-Euro office in Copenhagen. There was stuff going on in
the Americas already in the early 1960s -- see the volume edited by RE Popham,
Alcohol & Alcoholism, University of Toronto Press, 1970, reflecting a
conference in Chile in 1966. The Western Pacific Regional office in Manila had
consultants do reports on alcohol in one or another country when there would be
a spasm of interest -- Mac Marshall did one on Papua New Guinea, for instance.
In the Africa office in Brazzaville, alcohol has been the responsibility of
the mental health person, but that post was vacant for long periods of time,
and I never heard of much activity on alcohol from Brazzaville until the last
couple of years.
Here are web references to two bits I have done on the history of WHO and
alcohol in general:
http://www.bks.no/who-alco.pdf
pp. 146-162 in:
http://nat.stakes.fi/NR/rdonlyres/5A9E4067-62E0-478E-B450-
0F80A52A7DF8/0/supplement2005.pdf
Robin
On 2006-12-06, at 18:28, Virginia Berridge wrote:
> Dear Chuck,
> Sue Taylor is working with me on a Wellcome funded project on the
remedicalisation of cannabis and its impact on UK policy. She's been to Geneva
and looked at the material there.her e mail is [log in to unmask]
>
> Best wishes,
> Virginia
>
> Virginia Berridge
> Professor of History
> Centre for History in Public Health
> Department of Public Health and Policy
> London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
> Keppel Street
> London WC1E 7HT
> Tel: 0207 927 - 2269
> Fax: 0207 637 - 3238
> http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/history
>
>
>
>>>> "Ambler, Charles" <[log in to unmask]> 25/11/2006 17:31 >>>
>
> I’m interested in looking at the WHO library/archives for materials having to
do with perspectives on alcohol (and to a lesser extent drugs) use in Africa
and the “Third World” in the post war period. Anyone out there have experience
with the WHO? Thanks. Chuck Ambler
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