In the early 1980s, emphasis had shifted from the treatment of alcohol problems to their prevention. Yet no clear integrated policy yet existed about how alcohol problems could best be prevented. Many different strategies were put forward as solutions but some were in competition with each other, while some were actually incompatible.

Originally published in 1983, what this book does is to draw together a cross section of these different and competing voices so as to give a sense of the quality and direction of the great alcohol debate at the time. After setting into context some of the basic questions to do with the prevention of alcohol problems, the authors knit together and juxtapose short contributions from a very wide variety of experts from around the world. Clinicians, educators, sociologists, advertisers, marketing men, economists, philosophers, geneticists and international civil servants present different points of view on health education, the media, advertising, trade, the law, the environment and on the ethical basis of the debate itself. The authors bravely attempt to pull some general sense out of this profusion of what the way ahead is likely to be.

It should be noted that this reissue very much reflects the context of the times in which it was written and that the contributors were participating in a debate where differences of opinion were actively encouraged.