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