Alcohol Education

There has, over the past 20 years, been a growing recognition that alcohol problems are serious enough and extensive enough to merit greater attention than is currently being paid to them. The purpose of this paper is to examine one aspect of that attention — namely, alcohol education — in order to assess what impact it has, or is likely to have, upon the severity and magnitude of the problems it is intended to alleviate. As the first stage of that examination, it is important to determine just what sort of problems are indeed caused by excessive drinking. Only then will it be possible to decide whether education, which is at best a haphazard and potentially wasteful process, is indeed an appropriate strategy upon which to be pinning scarce hopes and scarcer dollars.