The great controlled-drinking controversy.

This chapter reviews the controlled-drinking controversy. It presents cameo descriptions of the controversy's three major episodes--those occasioned by D. L. Davies' 1962 report, the 1976 publication of the first Rand Report, and the 1982 publication in Science of a paper by Pendery, Maltzman, and West--as well as a cameo for the long "interepisode" period between Davies' paper and the Rand Report. I argue that the controversy has emerged out of the failure of the "new scientific approach" to alcoholism, initiated a half century ago, to advance alcoholism treatment significantly beyond the point from which it began. Lack of progress, in turn, has generated tensions and reverberations along many of the normative dimensions that define scientific/treatment activity, both internally and in relation to the broader society. Some of the changing social and valuative forces at work in the controversy's history are examined.