Nancy -- sure you can quote me on Lee Towle.  There is some discussion of the work in Geneva for which Lee was mid-wife (with encouragement early on from John Deering) on pp. 88-89 of my "The World Health Organization and alcohol control", British Journal of Addiction 79:85-92, 1984.  Lee's name, however, is not mentioned in this piece.
    On relations (or rather, the disconnect) between the Berkeley group (let's call it ARG for simplicity) and the Congressional world: 
    First, on the research centers: much applause from me, anyway, while you take your bow.
    The issue of research centres for alcohol was in the air in the mid-1970s -- California funded one at UCLA at about the same time as the first round of federal centres.  (From ARG's biased perspective, we wuz robbed on the California center.  It broke Don Cahalan's heart, and was a major factor in his decision to retire.)  I prepared a memo describing existing centres around the world, and quoting Kettil Bruun's contrast of how much stronger research was where there were "settled centers" (Norway, Finland) than where there were not (Sweden).  I know this got fed into the California discussions, but don't know if it ever got into the federal ones.  Ernie Noble's model for such centers, as I understood, was the MRC Centers in Britain; luckily, the US didn't end up with such a queen-bee model of centers built around a particular director.   
    We never sought out the legislative world, because we thought that was not our role as researchers.  We were quite critical, indeed, of how politicized Rutgers was perceived to be.  For some of my colleagues, there was a sense that science and politics don't and shouldn't mix.  For others of us, there was an alienation from or old wounds from the American political system.  I came out of the "new left" of the early 1960s, for instance; Don Cahalan's career as a survey researcher had been deeply affected in the McCarthy period by having been blacklisted for knowing someone who knew someone who had been to Russia.  Thirdly, at least till fairly late in the 1970s we had the sense, as I noted before, that the more the political system knew about our views and work on alcohol, the less it would like it.
    On the rare occasions when the political world came to us, we saw it as our duty to try to help.  Loran Archer discovered us while he was head of the California alcohol agency, and came to us for advice on how to proceed in opening up the field of prevention (which up to then had meant hanging brochures with the 12 signs of alcoholism on doorknobs).  One result of this was an international research conference in Berkeley in December 1974 on "The Prevention of Alcohol Problems", which was, as a Finnish annual report noted at the time, a sign of a new wind coming into US discussions.  At Loran's urging, we let Katherine Pike, Tom's wife and an influential figure in California alcoholism politics in her own right, sit in on the meeting.  She sent a very polite note to Don afterwards thanking him for the opportunity, but adding that she did think that the needs of the poor suffering alcoholic had been somewhat neglected in the meeting.  (Later she changed her position substantially on prevention and policy issues.)   Another Loran initiative, with encouragement from Don C., was a community alcohol problems prevention demonstration project which provided Larry Wallack, then new at ARG, with his big opportunity as study director.
    When Jerry Brown came in as governor, and Loran was clearly outgoing, Loran recommended me as a possible new head to succeed himself -- he thought my odd views might intrigue the odd politics of the incoming administration (Jerry B. and I had indeed once picked strawberries and sat at Dorothy Day's feet together on a student fieldtrip of pre-Cesar Chavez old Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee).  I was given a very unfocused and philosophical interview by Jacques Barzhagi, Brown's alter ego, but that was the end of that.  When Brown appointed his old roommate from Jesuit seminary, Baxter Rice, as head of the state ABC, and tried to combine the ABC and alcoholism agencies, we were drawn much more into the policy arena in California.  At Rice's invitation, I was the only person testifying for the merger before California's Little Hoover Commission -- both the alcohol beverage and the alcoholism treatment industries were horrified by the idea.
    But at the federal level, we received almost no calls or attention from the political side.  I was finally invited to testify before Senator Glenn about 1990, I think.  In going up to the Hill with scientists in tow to seek appropriations, NIAAA always took "real scientists" -- biologists and medical people.  Besides, I suspect they were afraid we were too likely to antagonize either the alcoholism constituency or the beverage industry or both.  So they kept us under wraps, and we had no incentive to potentially annoy them by offering ourselves.  And of course we were a long way outside the Beltway.
     Robin

-----Original Message-----
From: Nancy Olson <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: den 6 februari 2000 14:26
Subject: Re: How many alcoholics?


>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