1.  David:  My own view is that alcohol social science has become less
useful to broader fields of scholarship over the past 25 years or so.  The
main reason is that alcohol sociology got hijacked by public health.  Its
central question became, in effect:  How much responsibility for illness,
accidents, and crime may be reliably attributed to alcohol (BTW, alcohol,
per se, and not alcoholism or problem drinking)?  (Yawn.)  (Kaye Fillmore
and I gently chided the field in this regard in a critique published in 2000
-- see, http://www.roizen.com/ron/crisis.htm.)

2.  Robin and Maria:  Reasons may pose an epistemological minefield but it
is work like Mills' (1940) paper that turns makes this topic richly
revealing as well.

3.  Ernie and Fran:  Alcoholism wasn't mentioned in David's reasons
question, so your responses were interesting in that regard.  In fact,
alcohol epidemiology has spent a good deal of energy over the past quarter
century trying (and succeeding to a remarkable extent) in demonstrating that
the heaviest drinking end of the population continuum is as responsive to
policy changes affecting availability and consumption as is are the medium
and lighter drinkers.  So you were both on target and a little off-target in
your reply.

4.  My own best cut at understanding cross-cultural variation in drinking
(and, by extension, also historical change) -- i.e., my best effort to be
useful to the kind of scholarship you refer to -- came in the form of
something called the "differential access versus universal moderation"
hypothesis.  Of course, I never put any effort in trying to get them
published -- who knows why?  I wrote three or four pieces on this over the
1980s -- here is one, FYI:  http://www.roizen.com/ron/elpaso.htm.

P.S.  I don't mean this to be a "let's you and him fight" contribution, but
pt #3 in particular may have that potential.



-----Original Message-----
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of David Fahey
Sent: Monday, March 28, 2005 3:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: what can alcohol/drug historians learn from the social sciences?

I benefited greatly from the responses to my last question, so I feel
emboldened to ask a broader and more controversial question:  what can
alcohol/drug historians learn from the social sciences?  The old, sad
joke is that historians are a generation or two out of date in their
borrowings from the social sciences.  What do ADHS social scientists
think?  What would they recommend historians read?