As (I believe) the only resident--if oddly invisible-- card-carrying sociologist on this list, maybe I'd better insert a kind word on behalf of my disciplinary brethren. First of all, the irrepressible Stanton Peele is not a sociologist but a social psychologist by training--i.e., according to *Diseasing of America's* dustjacket. Second- ly--and this will surprise nobody--sociologists come in all flavors re the celebrated "disease concept of alcohol- ism": from staunch defenders/advocates (like David Pit- tman and Paul Roman) to deliberate disciplinary neutral- ists (like me) to perceptive critics (starting with John Seeley). Some sociologists have managed to be *more than one*--so, for example, the late Selden Bacon's 1958 essay, "Alcoholics Don't Drink," is a classic expression of the mechanical ineluctability implication of the disease idea whereas his equally classic 1943 essay, "Sociology and the Problems of Alcohol," has often been read as a caution against sending the nascent scientific research movement down the rabbit hole of an exclusive focus on disease alcoholism. Thirdly, the social history of sociological thought on the disease concept of alcoholism is, perhaps surprisingly, remarkably tame. If I might be permitted to skip down memory lane for a moment: Sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s were right in the thick of the attack on the disease conception of *mental illness*. Who can for- get names like Erving Goffman, Thomas Scheff, and Edwin Lemert, who joined forces with disaffected psychiatrists like R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz to mount the great "labeling theory" or "societal reaction" critique of conventional psychodynamic theory and nosology. What's really remarkable--and what remains an open history-of- ideas question to this day--is that this great wave of anti-disease thinking passed over sociologists interested in alcohol/alcoholism virtually without affecting them at all! (Elsewhere I've written some unpublished words on that "unnoticed wave"--but space limits going into it here.) Even Lemert's classic book, *Social Pathology* (1950 or so), one of the earliest & seminal works in the labeling theory tradition, lapsed out of the theoretical idiom applied to other sorts of deviance when it came to alcoholism--which topic was presented in pretty much the AA voice! Go figure.///The *sociological* assault on the disease conception came later and emerged not so much from a competing and conflicting set of disciplinary/conceptual /perceptual goggles as from a more or less dutiful appli- cation of "mindless" survey research methods to the alco- holism domain. The assault came in two forms--clinical & general population. David Armor & company, at RAND Corp., launched a wholly unintentional attack on *the clinical side* in their follow-up studies of the drinking practices of post-treatment clients at NIAAA funded treatment cen- ters in the mid-1970s. The roughly contemporary general population assault came in its best known form in the late Don Cahalan's efforts to operationalize disease symptoma- tology in survey questionnaires administered to represen- tative general (or nonclinical) population samples. The results in both cases were the same: the disease indica- tors were nowhere near as coherent as a symptomatology, nowhere near as predictive of the "disease's" natural his- tory, and nowhere near as immune to not-immoderate drink- ing as conventional "disease" wisdom had long suggested. Honest, hod-carrying, I'm-not-trying-to-cause-trouble, survey-research data-gatherers--whose data collection efforts had been structured along the lines of the prevailing clinical wisdom--were faced with data that simply did not fit the party line. END OF PART I