Ah, Robin, you are giving me an opportunity to do some more "living in the
past."  I have been doing a lot of that lately.

> we were awarded one of the first
> round of national alcohol research center grants in late 1977.

I'll take a bow for that one, thank you.  I had to push hard to get the
language creating the research centers in the Senate bill

     > We also did the draft of the prevention chapter (well, I did it,
actually), as well as some other bits.

Ah ha, so it was YOU who had me shouting alleluia all over the Hill.

> The draft report was seen as too long, complicated and learned
> for Capitol Hill

What you academic types didn't understand was that it was people like me --
in my responsibility for "Congressional oversight" of NIAAA --that read those
reports to Congress.  And most of the time you fellows talked over my head.

I wish more of you had come to see me.  The few who did -- like the boys from
Rutgers -- tended to be very condescending.  For example, I asked them one
time is we could get a subscription to their Journal, and was told "you
wouldn't understand it anyway."  They may have been right, but that was
politically dumb.

> I think we heard that this then resulted in some political criticism of the
report as lacking scientific documentation (which a press kit obviously would
not have).

The criticism came from the liquor industry and from those organizations that
were receiving funds from the industry, i.e., NCA, Rutgers, ACA, etc.  I
think I sent you and Ron a long paper on this a couple of years ago.  If I
can find it I will send it again.

I had to walk a tightrope, trying to please the AA constituency (which
included my boss) who believed they knew everything there was to know about
alcoholism and that no one else knew anything; the drys; and the industry
(which, to quote the late Harold Hughes, "spreads money all over the Hill
like shit over an Iowa barn).

One of the things that you guys didn't understand was that AA -- while it
officially takes no position on outside issues -- had a lot of highly placed
members.  Senators Hughes and Williams were both members.  And Ted Kennedy
(whose wife I was sponsoring in AA at the time) was very sympathetic to AA.

Tom Pike on the Advisory Board was also an influential member of AA.  (I had
quite a time with him when I kept Williams out of the silly hysteria about
the Rand Report.  I remember pointing out to him that Marty Mann's book
"Primer on Alcoholism" said pretty much the same thing.

And all of the volunteer organizations were heavily loaded with AA members,
who were dependent on the industry for their funding.

When people like Chafetz or the boys at Rutgers told them, for example, that
warning labels were "a simplistic solution," they backed down, not wanting to
seem simple.  (Silly me, I always thought "simple" was a graced condition.)

> Lee Towle's small policy analysis group within the Director's office, which
had
> coordinated the prepartion of A&H3, was dismantled -- in my view a real
> weakening of the Institute's capability in policy-related research.  Lee
was
> essentially given a broom-closet and a peripheral task -- director of
> international and intergovernmental relations.  As an intelligent and
> committed manager, he then proceeded to make something useful and
> productive of this task -- the alcohol program at the World Health
Organization in
> Geneva, starting in the late 1970s, was largely made possible by his
efforts
> in getting and managing NIAAA funding for the program.  But that's a whole
> other story.

Thanks for telling me this about Lee.  He was always a favorite of mine at
the Institute.  May I quote you in my book?

Again, I wish you guys had come to see me.  But you were naive about
politics, and I didn't understand the research.  Had we been communicating
something might have been improved, at least I would have invited you to
testify.

>      So it is not only in terms of my historical interests, but also in a
> kind of home-movie frame, that I would love to hear more about what exactly
> the alcoholism movement and the beverage industries didn't like about A&H3,
> and what you can tell us about how Ernie Noble got fired, and what A&H3 had
> to do with this.

I'll send you more on this later.

Nancy