ABSTRACT
The former approach relies on the purported “disease” status of the alcoholic, and on the holding of Robinson that the eighth amendment prohibits punishment for the status of being ill simpliciter. The obvious difficulty with the Robinson analogy, however, is that Robinson emphatically limits its holding to the disease-status and excludes from its scope any anti-social “behavior” associated with the disease. The official AMA announcement and the wide professional use — especially in public discussion —of such formulas as “alcoholism is a disease’’ have been vital to the growing public support of medical research in the area. Alcoholics Anonymous maintains that alcoholism is a “disease,” but not that drinking is involuntary. On the contrary, the entire approach in Alcoholics Anonymous is to enlist the voluntary cooperation of the alcoholic, to appeal to him on moral-religious-pragmatic grounds to voluntarily abstain from drinking, and to engage in reciprocal self-help along these lines with his brother AA members.
