Cultural Level Interventions in the Arena of Alcoholism

Abstract

Three traditions of alcoholism are reviewed: a moral model, a disease model, and a public health model. The public health model is emerging as a major paradigmatic shift, supported by substantial empirical data of the past decade. The arena of alcoholism has heretofore included only alcoholics, and excluded consideration of all other drinkers. The public health model reformulates alcoholism as a general population problem. The definition of alcoholism is disaggregated into discrete behavioral factors. In turn, this affords consideration of targeted interventions at different levels of cultural action to modify alcoholic factors in drinking behavior.