Alcoholism: a medical or a political problem?

In 1948 the World Health Organisation included alcoholism itself, as distinct from alcoholic psychoses and acute alcohol poisoning, in the International Classification of Disease. Eight years later the American Medical Association declared in a formal statement that alcoholism was a disease, and in 1960 Jellinek' published his influential book The Disease Concept of Alcoholism. These events were the culmination of a long campaign, dating back to Thomas Trotter2 at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to convince the medical profession and the public that habitual drunkenness was not simply a vice. Its