A couple of relevant reference:
   Raul Caetano, Diffusion of an idea: Jellinek's disease concept in Latin
America, International Journal of Addictions 20:1629-1641, 1985.
   Robin Room, The World Health Organization and alcohol control, British
Journal of Addiction 79:85-92, 1984.
   There's a tradition of researchers taking US- or Europe-derived
disease-conceptish measures into faraway places and finding they don't
work very well.  See:
   S.Z. Klausner and E.F. Foulks, Eskimo Capitalists: Oil, Politics and
Alcohol.  totowa, NJ: Allanheld, Osmun, 1982.
   K.-D. Gorenc et al., A crosscultural study: a comparisons of German,
Spanish and Ecuadorian alcoholics using the Munich Alcoholism Test
(MALT), American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse 10:429-446, 1984.
   R. Room et al., "WHO cross-cultural applicability research on diagnosis
and assessment of substance abuse disorders: an overview of methods
and selected results", with commentaries and a response, Addiction
(forthcoming).
 
   I was a consultant to the 1970s WHO project which had a Zambian leg
(as was Ron Roizen, who also reads the stuff here).  The WHO project
officer, Joy Moser, was determined that the project would as far as
possible do stuff which was culturally appropriate, but was hampered in
this by the US funding agency (and maybe also by consultants like me).
This was the era of the ascendancy of the Chinese "barefoot doctor"
model at WHO, with a focus on community-level work and on primary
health care.  This mainspring of this emphasis in WHO came from T.
Lambo, the Nigerian assistant director general with responsibility for
mental health.  Ironically, Nigeria is one of the African countries which
has remained farthest from the community health care model, with a
strong tradition of academically-inclined elite psychiatrists staying within
the confines of big teaching hospitals.
   The WHO COmmunity Response project's main collaborator in Zambia
was Alan Haworth, a British psychiatrist with a strong community
orientation: he showed us pictures of what had been done in Zambia at
that time, taking the bars off the mental wards in Zambia and setting up
villages of the mentally ill. Alan is still active in Zambia, I believe.  Some
years ago, he had compiled a lengthy typewritten list of African
publications and reports on alcohol and drugs; it would be a good source
if you could get him to share it with you.
   You can get a line on a more recent WHO project with an African leg
in: Wayne Hall et al., The structure and correlates of alcohol
dependence: WHO collaborative project on the early detection of
persons with harmful alcohol consumption -- III, Addiction 88:1627-1636.
   There was an old tradition of inebriates' asylums in South Africa
(there's a reference or two in J. Baumohl and R. Room, "Inebriety,
doctors and the state: alcoholism treatment institutions before 1940", pp.
135-174 in M. Galanter, ed., Recent Developments in Alcoholism, vol. 5,
New York: Plenum, 1987), and the South African National Council on
Alcoholism (SANCA), AA, etc. emerged in the last 40 years as the
carriers there of U.S.-derived disease models.  Elsewhere there was
and is probably not much else in the way of alcohol treatment other than
whatever turns up in mental hospital systems.
   Illicit drugs is another matter, since the US and Europe have poured
great amounts of money into the drug control system centred in Vienna,
and this system has been trying to pay more attention to "demand
reduction", which includes treatment.  I don't know much about what this
system has done in Africa.  Places to start would be the Bulletin on
Narcotics, the annual reports of the International Narcotics Control Board,
reports of the United Nations Drug Control Programme (and UNFDAC --
UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control before UNDCP), maybe the UN
Narcotics Commission annual proceedings.  I would be interested in what
you find out if you go down this track. Most of the activity on this front
would be in the last 20 years.  For North Africa, there are also Arabic
regional institutions in the drug field.
   One activity the UNDCP was financing until recently was training
courses offered by the International Council on Alcohol and Addictions
(ICAA), headquartered in Lausanne.  These were first established in
Nigeria, starting with many foreign faculty but eventually moving to
indigenous teachers, mostly psychiatrists; training courses have also
been offered once or twice elsewhere in Africa, including I believe to
francophones. ICAA's library and archives in Lausanne might well be
worth a visit from your perspective -- you maybe could do some oral
history with Eva Tongue, who set up and ran the training courses.  My
name will not help gain entry.
   I hope all this is helpful.  The irony of the processes of cultural diffusion
and transmission you are studying is that sometimes in recent decades it
is the Europeans etc. who are more sensitive to cultural differences, and
the local professionals who are most determined to do it the right way as
they were taught in London or wherever.
   I look forward to whatever you come up with.   Robin Room