New Zealand Drinking Habits and Treatment of Probationers WHO Abuse Alcohol

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Abstract
The importance of drinking in New Zealand and the ambivalent cultural attitudes towards the use of alcohol are outlined. Although the cost to society is most dramatically illustrated by those who suffer the ravages of alcoholism with its poor prognosis, a case is made for identifying and providing treatment at an earlier stage to other groups of suspected alcohol abusers. The second part of the paper describes a controlled drinking training programme being established by the author for probationers whose offending involved drinking. By providing community-based treatment for these inappropriate drinkers it is hoped to short circuit the sequence of institutionalization, labelling, and subsequent social rejection (Blizzard, 1971) which appear to be central in the development of the alcoholic's selffulfilling prophecy of “one drink, then drunk”. By shaping up controlled drinking as a social skill, the avoidance conditioning paradigm outiined here fulfils the “constructional” approach to problem behaviours advocated by Coldiamond (1974). This contrasts with the traditional medical model which entails abstinence, but at the same time removes responsibility for drinking from the alcohol abuser by endowing him with a disease process which is progressive and irreversible.
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