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