title: Towards a more rational approach to the alcohol problem.
abstract: Alcohol is the favoured intoxicant of European man and his descendants overseas. As such, its dangers are generally glossed over. The "disease model" of the last forty years owes much of its popularity to the implication that there is something psychologically or biochemically abnormal about those who become "alcoholics" and that the rest of us can happily drink in comparative safety. Unfortunately, the facts do not fit these convenient assumptions. In the last twenty years worldwide recorded production of alcoholic beverages has doubled and the epidemiological evidence that has accumulated during this period makes it clear that, when the per capita consumption of a country or community rises, all the easily measurable ill effects, medical and social, also rise. Conversely, if per capita consumption falls, even modestly, these ill effects also fall. Per capita consumption is thus the crucial factor determining the scale of the whole gamut of adverse effects which are, by any standards, intolerable in many different countries at the present time. This has very inconvenient implications--for individual "social drinkers", for governments and for the alcohol industry--which have not yet been faced.
mesh_terms: D000428:Alcohol Drinking; D000437:Alcoholism / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000517:prevention & control; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D005060:Europe; D006801:Humans; D012926:Social Control, Formal; D012940:Social Problems; D014481:United States