8/4/95
Dear Ron:
        I am always dreadfully behind, more so since retiring because I
don't work as much. This is a very late reeply to your seven part essay
on the disease concept of alcoholism. I much admired it. As is usually
the case, your originality and erudition are at the top and I learn much.
I am not in disagreement with you at all, although i have some added
thoughts. First, no bibography can be complete.However the sociologists
did not completely ignore the disease concept.You are aware of Craig
MacAndrew's paper of 1969, I'm sure. (Tho he is a card carrying
psychologist but was also an ethnometh.) But in 1978 Joe Schneider wrote
a paper in Social Problems (not an obscure place) on the social
construction of the disease concept of alcoholism. This later formed an
entire chapter in the influential book, Deviance and Medicalization by
Peter Conrad and Schneider (1980)
        The more pertinent issue however that you raise is the relative
lack of critcism of the paradigms of alcohol research, a matter that
interests me greatly You are right as rain and I want to suggest some
reassons for it. I did some of this for DUI research in my 1981 book, The
Culture of Public Problems. It smacks of self-serving, but I do much of
this head-on in a bookContested Meanings: The Construction of Alcohol
Problems, to be published in Feb., 1996 by U Wisconsin Press. In there,
especially in ch.3, I analyze several major alcohol studies with an eye
on the deficient analysis of "normal" drunkenness and the alcohol studies
lack of appreciation of it. What are the consequences of examining
drinking solely as a social problem. I won't expand on that here. But I
do want to suggest some reasons for why there are so few "outsiders",in
your terms,-critics of alcohol research.
        However, first some remaks on the disease concept.Jellinek,at
least once in print, pictured the disease model as public relations-a way
of getting more compassion for the alcoholic. Also, the disease model
never was accepted by more than a slivr of the population and then mostly
in public arenas, especially where money was possible available from
public sources. Alcoholism has remained a condition to be hidden, a flaw
of characer despiteand sometimes alongside the disease appelation. Even
AA members will not use their last names, but cancer victims will.
Witness how Mickey Mantle has identified himself as have others about his
ailment and his drinking.
        Why so little internal criticsm of alcohol research or, perhaps
another way of putting, why such a paucity of good research about drinking?
Two aspects of alcohol research have struck me. One-"soft" money. This
has meant that the social problem concerns of research have
precedenceover "pure " research, The busyness of institutes, centers,
etc. often impedes the thoughtfulness and time-emptiness that is
valuable, The next grant proiposal stares you in the face.There is too
much money for conferences in too many places. A lot of researchgets done
but it isnot always as good as it might be. Adminstration takes over.
(Robin-where is your book?)
        There are many excellent people in the field but the whole is
crammed and stifled by the second, perhaps more central concern-the
medical model of research and science. It put a premium on experimental
or quantitative work and on research papers and on exhaustive erudition.
        The intersting and vital work in alcohol research in recent years
has, in my estimation, come from historians, including your history of
the alcoholism movement. It has done so because most historians are
either in universities or colleges or are unemployed.Especially since the
rise of social history, it leads them to look at behavior rather than
public actions alone or at surveys.From the early 1980s (Rosenzweig"s
wonderful study) there have been studies of drinking and drinking
locations that have come from the historians.The field is too much
dominated by "soft" money and by "insiders" and by the medics. who
disdain books and have a warped view of scholarship.
        These are rambling without editing or rewriting or even rereading If you
throw
these thoughts back at me I'll deny them and say that some other person
used my computer.
 
thanks for jogging me into this escapade.
                                Mit my usual admiration,
                                Joe Gusfield