Word: alcoholic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Volunteers decorated the one-time Boy Scout room with flashing lights and sheets of paper inviting creative doodling. An American flag hangs in the door way. One sign asks visitors to remove their shoes to protect the floor while another warns "No alcohol, no illegal substances, no sexual intercourse...
...SERIES of research findings in the 1950's established beyond further doubt that a high proportion of automobile accidents, perhaps especially fatal accidents, involve alcohol. In association with other research establishing the significant pharmacological effect on driving skill and judgment of even low levels of blood alcohol content, and considering that three-quarters of the adult population of the United States uses alcohol in greater or lesser quantities, it readily came to be assumed, in the words of Dr. Julian A. Waller, "that the majority of drinking accidents are caused by the majority of drinking drivers, namely, the social drinkers...
Only recently has it begun to be perceived that for a great many persons the heavy use of alcohol, to the point of repeated intoxication, is less a matter of wrongdoing than of illness. Even more recently physicians have begun to speak of persons who "have alcoholism," much as others might be described as "having tuberculosis." Very much as in the case of automobile accidents, society appears to be verging toward a redefinition of this issue: what has hitherto been seen as a problem of public order is increasingly being defined as one of public health. Nor surprisingly, the relationship...
Even on the surface, the proposition that every tenth oncoming vehicle encountered on the highway is likely to be driven by an alcoholic is less than reassuring, but on closer examination the matter appears even more serious. Following on the research findings that demonstrated the high proportion of alcohol-related accidents, a second generation of studies now begins to establish that a wholly disporportionate number of such accidents involve not just drinking drivers but, in fact, alcoholic drivers. Reports from Sweden, Germany, Canada and Australia, as well as those carried out in the United States, increasingly converge on the probability...
...accidents are the fault of the driver" became established in the conventional wisdom of the traffic safety field. Repeatedly the institutions that have encouraged this belief have been challenged to produce acceptable evidence that it is so. Just as repeatedly the challenge has been ignored. Although the use of alcohol by drivers is known to be the chief factor in the initiation of fatal crashes, this constant emphasis on the culpability of drivers probably has the effect of lessening anxiety about the driving task: if accidents are the fault of drivers, then the individual has some control over his future...