title: Prevention of alcoholism in the United States and the National Council on Alcoholism: 1944-1950.
abstract: An historical viewpoint discloses two potential impediments to effective primary prevention of alcoholism with a communitywide focus: (1) weak evaluation instruments measuring the outcome of primary prevention programs, and (2) the difficulty of creating and maintaining a sufficiently high degree of interorganizational coordination. The origin of the National Council on Alcoholism during the 1940s is used as a focal point for the study. Thie article details the importance, today as well as four decades ago, of designing prevention programs that are well conceived, implemented, and evaluated.
mesh_terms: D000437:Alcoholism / Q000517:prevention & control*; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D009938:Organizations / Q000266:history; D014481:United States