Billion-Dollar Hangover

Alcoholism costs U.S. industry about $1 billion a year in lost time and inefficient work. A group of Chicago doctors and businessmen got together to discuss and do something about this fact: they formed the Chicago Committee on Alcoholism and picked as president the University of Chicago's famed physiologist, Dr. Anton J. Carlson.

Last week, in the former nightclub room of the Morrison Hotel, the committee held the nation's first industrial conference on alcoholism. Businessmen, doctors, welfare workers and labor leaders stated their views. Highlights:

P: The things that drive a man to drink-- the wrong kind of job or trouble at home --can frequently be corrected.

P: The only thing that non-psychiatric medical treatment can do about alcoholism is cure some of its complications (e.g., malnutrition).

P: Alcoholism is a disease rather than a moral lapse--and employers had best remember that.

P: Employers should provide hospitalization for alcoholism, just as they do for other diseases.

P: Alcoholics Anonymous has been more successful than any other group in helping alcoholics.

A member of Alcoholics Anonymous told the industrialists: "We welcome the people who sweep out your office as well as the vice president or general manager who is swept out."

Virginia last week became the first state with model legislation on alcoholism, as recommended by the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol (a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science). The Virginia legislature appropriated $200,000, to be spent over a two-year period on treatment, rehabilitation and research.

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