Very little has been published in anything other than statistical journals
about the Ledermann theory, although I did mention it in the British
edition of my social history of drink (pp. 315-6, 320, 323-4). Formulated 
by a French statistician called Sully Ledermann, it posits (if that is the
word) that there exists a direct statistical correlation between the
average level of alcohol consumption and the amount of alcohol-related harm
in any given society. This forms the basis of the "public health model"
(which I think is the US term) or "population" model (the UK term) of
dealing with alcohol problems, according to which alcohol-related problems
are increased if average consumption increases and decrease if average
consumption falls, i.e. alcoholism is not a disease that strikes
individuals but a social problem affecting society at large.  
 
Obviously this approach has encountered some difficulty in getting accepted
in the US because it conflicts with the disease theory of alcoholism
propagated by Alcoholics Anonymous and (I believe) pragmatically adopted by
the medical profession as a means of getting alcoholics into treatment.
Nevertheless, the public health/population model is official WHO policy and
is supposed to have been adopted by its member countries. It lies behind
the target declared by the WHO some years ago of reducing alcohol
consumption by 25 per cent by the year 2000, which the US government
adopted in its "Healthy People 2000" report published in 1990. So it is
very influential, even if it is wrong (I am no statistician, but I simply 
don't understand how it can apply uniformly to different societies with
different drinking patterns, as it is supposed to).  
 
But I do believe that its influence must be declining now that all the
evidence about the health benefits of moderate drinking stands in the way 
of the efforts of the WHO and its member states to tell their citizens who
drink moderately to cut down on their alcohol consumption for the sake of 
the national health. That is why I was so surprised to read a report of the
Irish Health Minister advocating precisely this policy - "Less is Better" 
being the WHO dictum to get moderate drinkers to cut down.  
 
The Alcohol in Moderation Conference at VINEXPO in Bordeaux last June, in 
which I was involved, was basically directed at debunking this approach - 
hence our title, "Is More Better?" Unfortunately, not everyone who made
speeches at the conference wrote them out and no one recorded them, so we 
have only a few transcripts. The speakers were Jancis Robinson, Thomas
Stuttaford, Diederick Grobbee, Jacques Weill (a statistician who tried his
very best to explain to a lay audience why Ledermann was wrong), Dwight
Heath and myself. Alcohol in Moderation now has a web site at
http://www.btinternet.com/~aimdigest, and can be contacted by email at
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