I'm with you Jared, out here in the same wilderness.  I posted the URL to
an article I wrote a decade ago on the downsides of the seeming innocuous
trend toward conflating alcohol and illicit drugs.  But it too, it seems,
was facing too big a tide in the other direction.

Lunch sometime?

Ron

----------
From: Jared Lobdell <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: changes for our organization and its journal
Date: Wednesday, August 18, 2004 5:48 PM

I suppose there's no point in being the voice of one crying in the
wilderness, but in the change I fear lest concern specifically with alcohol
(thus with "Temperance" as generally understood, and with alcoholism and
its treatment -- my field in this context) will become swallowed up in the
concern for the more wide-ranging, more "relevant," and perhaps trendier
world of drugs (or as some would say, "drugs other than alcohol"). 
Doubtless due care will be taken to see this does not happen? -- Jared
Lobdell

-------------- Original message -------------- 
This summer has seen the beginning of exciting changes. What was called the
Alcohol and Temperance History Group (ATHG), founded in 1979, now will be
called the Alcohol and Drugs History Society (ADHS). The organization’s
publication has gone through a series of names, most recently, the Social
History of Alcohol Review. Now it will be the Social History of Alcohol and
Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal (SHAD). ADHS and SHAD will expand the
interest in drugs that already had existed under the previous names.
Earlier this year our president Ian Tyrrell recommended the expansion in
the scope of the organization and its journal. Illustrating the overlap
between alcohol and drugs history, the meetings held in Canada in May 2004
were called the International Conference on Drugs and Alcohol in History.
The publication series planned by Northern Illinois University Press also
combines alcohol history with the history of drugs.

The first number of SHAD will be an annual. We expect that it will go to
the printers this autumn, so those of you who have been revising an article
or writing a critique of one or reviewing a book or an exhibit should
complete your work ASAP. David Fahey is serving as interim editor-in-chief
for this issue only. Jon Miller is executive editor. The other editors are
Scott Haine, Dan Malleck, and (with focus on the history of drugs) Jim
Mills.

We welcome your suggestions for the journal: its contents, frequency, and
format (electronic or print). SHAD is a refereed journal.

Sometime in the not distant future, the names of the website and the
listserv discussion group will change, the former probably to and the
latter to . Matthew McKean is the new webmaster and the new co-moderator of
the discussion group.

At the beginning of 2005, Scott Martin will become secretary-treasurer.

David M. Fahey
History Department
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056, USA
[log in to unmask]