erienced negative consequences of alcohol use such as arrest or involvement in an accident. In addition, an estimated 4.6 million young people aged 14 to 17 are problem drinkers. The public health consequences of problem drinking include injuries and deaths from fires, falls, drowning, homicide, suicide, family abuse and other violence as well as industrial and motor vehicle accidents. An estimated one-third to one-half of all unintentionally and intentionally injured adult Americans involved in accidents, crimes, and suicides had been drinking alcohol (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00000821.htm).
It might seem to be of relatively little importance whether we consider alcoholism to be caused by genes or by environment: What is important is helping alcoholics to get better. But the catch is that neither medical professionals nor social workers can help people to get better if they do not understand the underlying causes - the etiology - of a problem (Akins et al., 2003). If alcoholism is a primarily genetically based condition, then certain treatments will be effective while other treatments will be useless. The same is true if alcoholism is a primarily learned behavior. TO understand the importance of etiology in treating alcoholism, we may draw an analogy to another condition like diabetes. If a person's diabetes is caused (as is the case with some forms of the disease) primarily because of genetics, then it will do little good to educate that person about better nutrition and the importance of regular exercise. However, if the individual's diabetes arises primarily from poor eating habits and lack of regular exercise (as it indeed does in some individuals) then such lectures may indeed be highly effective (Tom
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