Alcohol and Public Policy Beyond the Shadow of Prohibition (1981) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 112-116
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From page 112... ...
The Prohibition era, however, left a sour taste on the national palate, inducing not only a decisive rejection of radical measures of control, but also inclining people toward the belief that no measure of prevention can have a beneficial result. That belief is not sustained by the evidence.
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From page 113... ...
These problems are broadly based and cannot be effectively approached except through broad, general measures of the sort that we have called prevention policies. If these measures are to be general, they must of necessity be relatively nonpersonal, because of the enormous costs economic and political that would arise from trying to tailor such a mass activity to the variable personal characteristics of tens of millions of
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From page 114... ...
Beyond the characteristics of being general and nonpersonal, prevention policies do not conform to a single model. For our purposes, we divided prevention policies into three broad classes according to their proximate targets: first, those instruments directed at the supply of alcohol and places to drink it; second, those aimed at the drinking practices of consumers once they have alcohol; and finally those that seek to alter characteristics of the social and physical environment involved in producing certain consequences of drinking (e.g., automobiles in drunken driving, employers' attitudes toward recovered alcoholics)
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From page 115... ...
The systematic extension of blood alcohol content testing to reporting systems in other areas of accident and safety research would help considerably in reducing the range of uncertainty about the size of alcohol problems in different areas and would permit concentration on preventive measures that are most likely to have significant effect. In developing and applying the prevention perspective, we have been struck by, and had to resist most forcibly, the tendency to think about policy in terms of opposed pairs: dry versus wet, prohibition versus unlimited access, treatment versus prevention, good drinking versus bad drinking.
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From page 116... ...
· Alcohol problems tend to be so broadly felt and distributed as to be a general social problem, even though they are excessively prevalent in a relatively small fraction of the population. · The possibilities for reducing the problem by preventive measures are modest but real and should increase with experience; they should not be ignored because of ghosts from the past.
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