Voluntary Organizations and the State in the Prevention of Alcohol Problems

Don Cahalan and alcohol policy issues An essay on issues in alcohol policy and the community prevention of alcohol problems seemed an appropriate contribution to a journal issue in honor of Don Cahalan. In the first place, during the years we worked together, Don taught me many things about myself; one of these was that my fundamental metier is as an essayist. In the second place, in the later phases of his career, Don himself turned increasingly to concerns with community prevention and with alcohol policy issues. As initiator of the evaluation of the California Prevention Demonstration program (Wallack and Barrows, 1982), Don led the way in applying a community trial design, loosely modeled on the Stanford Heart Disease project, in the alcohol field. After his retirement, Don came into his own as a writer on alcohol and drug policies, both in terms of their development in the United States and in terms of laying out public health approaches to their prevention (Cahalan, 1987; 1991). This essay is offered in the spirit of these concerns.