US of AA by Joe Miller

Author:Joe Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The President has asked me to thank you for your warm and thoughtful letter of March 9, and for your strong support for his actions to deal with alcoholism as a public health issue. As you know, the President is eager to see the Federal Government deal vigorously with this problem, which touches nearly every American family. As he goes forward with his efforts, he is deeply grateful for the heroic work which you and your colleagues are doing in this field.

Mann was appointed to the committee Johnson had called for, which promptly began discussing legislative action to address alcoholism. At the time of Johnson’s speech, there were several alcoholism bills in Congress asking for as much as $46 million for research, and Johnson’s own Economic Opportunity Amendments of 1966 sought to devote $10 million to develop treatment programs in communities across the United States. Following the Minnesota Model for treatment, the amendment called for the hiring and training of recovered alcoholics to work as counselors. As the midterm elections approached, the NCA issued a memorandum to its affiliates urging them to ask their congressional candidates where they stand on these bills and on the issue of alcoholism.

In late October of that year, at the height of the midterm election season, John W. Gardner, Johnson’s new secretary of health, education, and welfare, called a press conference to announce his responses to the president’s mandate. “Four to five million Americans are alcoholics,” he told the reporters, “and the burden of their alcoholism is not carried by them alone. It directly—and often tragically—affects between 16 and 20 million members of their families.”

He recommended the creation of a National Center for the Prevention and Control of Alcoholism within the National Institute of Mental Health, with the goal of “making the best treatment and rehabilitation services available to those who need them now,” pursuing a long-range goal of developing more effective means of prevention and rehabilitation.

Not long after Johnson’s historic declaration of alcoholism as a disease, a man named Donald B. Lee wrote a letter to him. He’d been an acquaintance of the president’s when they had both served in the US Navy, and he wrote that he’d struggled with alcoholism but was sober thanks to AA. In the process of straightening his life out, he’d become affiliated with a nonprofit in Millerton, New York, called My Brother’s Place, a halfway house that provided therapy to alcoholics based on AA, “which itself has provided the most successful treatment known for the disease,” though he was quick to add: “I must point out, however, that the program proposed by ‘My Brother’s Place’ is in no way affiliated with AA, but would derive substantial support, service and guidance from scores of persons who achieved sobriety through the AA program.”

Lee told Johnson that the program had submitted a grant request to the National Institutes of Health for $611,000 to cover a three-year pilot, and he asked if the president might throw his muscle behind it and free the funds up for their project.

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