Viewed from American shores, another threat to the clas-
sical disease originated in the increasingly international
character of the alcohol research collegium.  In foreign
lands--where the disease ideology was less strongly em-
braced and the abstinence requirement less mandatory--our
American preoccupations with both could could begin to
take on a parochial, even peculiar, feel.  "What are
Americans so up in arms about the disease concept?" one
could almost hear some of our British, Finnish, & even
Canadian friends sometimes muttering to one another--or
even to us.  Institutional success & growth also under-
mined classical disease thinking here in the U.S. (see my
"The Great Controlled-Drinking Contoversy," 1987:255-260).
The infusion of federal, state, & (in due course) insur-
eance dollars attracted into a burgeoning treatment &
research field new professionals with little or no strong
attachments to the classical disease paradigm.  Miller and
Kurtz (yes, celebrated AA-historian *Ernest* Kurtz) have
recently argued--in what I for one regard as a quite
significant new paper--that classical disease thinking as
it is articulated in many modern treatment settings in
fact only poorly reflects AA's original alcoholism para-
digm and its much more attenuated relation to the disease
claim.  The great E.M. Jellinek, himself--in what must be
one of the great ironies of the modern movement--concluded
that not science but instead medical fashion & opinion
were the final arbiters of what a society did and did not
come to regard as a "disease" (Jellinek, 1960).  Yet that
very citation--"Jellinek (1960)"--has been offered
countless times (in papers, talks, and books) on behalf of
Jellinek-the-hero-scientist's pro-disease stance & author-
ity--presumably on the strength of the man's movement-
friendly reputation/contributions and the book's pro-
disease-sounding title!  Even academic philosophy & law
have emerged as disease concept adversaries in the U.S.
--e.g., in the form of Fingarette's (1970) searching
assessment of its shaky factual footing in Powell v Texas
and the U.S. Supreme Court's twice-expressed disinclina-
tion to embrace the disease concept's involuntarist impli-
cations into American law.///I'd like to offer the radical
conjecture here that the simple "truths" about the disease
concept's provenance and diffusion that most of us have
been taught over the years are probably virtually opposite
the real history:  We've been taught that the disease
concept of alcoholism was promoted to the American public
because it represented the agreed and valid expression of
the appropriate scientific, medical, & AA knowledge--in
short, that it reflected *enlightened* scientific author-
ity.  Popular opinion, we've been taught, simply *lagged*
behind elite-enlightened opinion--as is not unusual in
such matters.  But a truer statement may be that it was
decidedly easier to transform *popular opinion* about
alcoholism's disease character/status than it was (or has
been since) to transform *scientific/medical/elite opin-
ion*, where the disease conception had been problematic
from the outset.  It is easy to offer reasons for the
popular opinion's easier transformation on this issue:
First, the average person might not care very much whether
alcoholism was a disease or not--and thus gladly oblige
opinion-poll takers by saying disease if that's what
teachers, moral entrepreneurs, or government experts
seemed to desire.  Second, if mere public lip-service were
all that was required, then the disease issue itself need
not be pursued to any great intellectual depth--thus also
easing its adoption in public opinion.  END OF PART VI