Drunkenness, 1943

Of every 1,000 adult Americans, six or seven are alcoholics. Yet in most U.S. communities "the only public institution willing to accept an alcoholic is the jail."

In Manhattan last week famed, forthright Physiologist Anton J. Carlson of the University of Chicago chairmaned a meeting aimed at overcoming this situation. The conferees were no sere cluster of drys: they were top-notch physiologists, psychiatrists, clergymen, social workers and representatives of Alcoholics Anonymous (organization of cured alcoholics), called together by the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol, a branch of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

They pooled new ideas on prevention and treatment of alcoholism, totted up a long indictment of the American people for being bad keepers of their drunken brothers:

> In accord with anti-saloon propaganda, most citizens regard alcoholism as a moral offense; it is actually a disease.

> Almost no state funds are appropriated specifically to cope with alcoholism.

> Prewar Europe had many public hospitals for alcoholics, but in the U.S. such facilities are inadequate or lacking. The first state hospital exclusively for alcoholics is now being established in Illinois.

> Scarcely better than the standard treatment of clapping a drunk in jail until he sobers up is an overnight stay in a city hospital. But all Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital could do for 12,000 drunks last year was to keep them 24 to 72 hours, then turn them loose.

Hope Springs. . . . Young, white-haired Dr. Thomas A. C. Rennie of the Psychiatric Clinic at New York Hospital listed medicine's weapons against alcoholism: psychiatry, vitamins, sedatives, high carbohydrate diet and, to help bring a man out of delirium tremens, glucose and insulin. He told about the encouraging results of the conditioned reflex treatment, which makes a man nauseated at the sight or smell of alcohol: 76% of one series of patients were improved.

The Council suggested that:

> The U.S. public abandon its fanatical attitudes on liquor. Since prohibition proved itself worse than useless, alcoholism should be accepted as a public health problem.

> Centers should be established where alcoholics and their families, clergymen, laymen and the family physician can find out how to prevent and treat alcoholism. (The Council itself will soon establish one such center in Manhattan as a beginning.)

> Since alcoholics, including many dangerous characters likely to commit "explosive" acts, often comprise one-fifth of the inhabitants of a jail or penitentiary, they should receive treatment as well as jailing.

The Council agreed that special state hospitals for alcoholics are necessary, as state mental hospitals cannot give needed treatment. Dr. Robin C. Buerki, director of the University of Pennsylvania Hospitals, predicted that the general hospital of the future will take responsibility for treating all a community's ills, psychiatric and alcoholic cases along with the rest. The record of the general hospitals which do treat alcoholics is far better than that of state mental hospitals.

As to funds, Dr. Carlson made a drastic suggestion: the liquor industry should allot 10% of its present advertising budget, and Government should contribute a big chunk of the liquor revenue to the prevention and treatment of alcoholism.

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