Inventing the Alcoholic: Canadian Public Policy and the Individualization of Deviance

Inventing the Alcoholic: Canadian Public Policy and the Individualization of Deviance Greg Marquis History and Politics Department University of New Brunswick Saint John email: [email protected] A paper prepared for the Atlantic Provinces’ Political Science Association Conference, Saint John, New Brunswick, Oct. 14, 2001 NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 1 In May of 2001, New Brunswickers were urged to vote to support the retention of Video Lottery Terminals (VLTs) in bars, taverns and other licensed premises in order to assist in the proper treatment of “problem” gamblers, who are thought to be 3-5% of the population. The provincial government which authorizes and derives revenues from VLTs chose to remain “neutral,” although messages regarding a soft government revenue situation and the need to keep gambling out of the hands of organized crime leaked from state officials into the media prior to the referendum. Visitors to bars the week before the vote were met with signage declaring that the removal of VLTs would spell the doom of the bar and restaurant industry and hurt community groups and charities. Another claim was that with legal VLTs gone, the Hell’s Angels would fill the vacuum with illegal activities (Committee for Responsible and Regulated Gaming). Pro-VLT forces (the “Committee on Responsible and Regulated Gambling” and the N.B. Coin Machine Operators Association) hired a leading communications consultant who structured a publicity campaign based on notions of “responsibility”: fiscal, industry and individual. Government-regulated VLTs, much like lotteries and casinos, were promoted as fiscally responsible because they earned millions of dollars for education, health care and other services; the “industry” (manufacturers, VLT owners and leasees) supposedly promoted “responsible gaming,” and promised to work with government to do more for the third category, individual “players” who were “addicts” or “problem” gamers. With a low voter turnout, the pro-VLT forces won by a slim margin that indicated the ambivalence of New Brunswickers toward provincial gaming policy. Given that the operators announced their plan only four days before the referendum, the outcome was a significant victory.i Within academic and policy discourse, the very concept of addiction as an objective reality is under attack, and within sociology we encounter explanations of the “social construction” of various public problems (Alexander 1990, 115). Yet amongst Canada’s media, interest groups, and state bureaucracies, addiction is a “real issue” with policy implications. And public opinion reveals contrasting views on specific details of regulated gambling (Telegraph Journal, May 12 2001). Problem gambling did not exist as a medical or policy category until the last quarter of the 20th century, when Canada’s federal and provincial governments began to regulate gaming. In the 19th and early 20th century, the middle class and elite viewed various forms of gambling as a vice and made it illegal under the Criminal Code. In the 1960s, the law was changed in an attempt to keep up with social reality: the majority of Canadians either engaged in, or supported the right to take part in games of chance with a possibility of monetary gain. In recent years, governments have moved away from a “necessary vice” framework of gaming regulation to a convenience model that emphasises the player not as a threat to the public interest but as a consumer (Globe and Mail, May 4 2001; MPM Gaming Research 1998). And gaming revenues are constituting an important part of provincial government “sin taxes” (Johnson and Meier 1990). On the other hand, mental health professionals by the early 1990s were estimating that there were up to several million “pathological” gamblers in the United States (Murray 1993, 791). i For the New Brunswick situation, see the papers by Hyson listed in the bibliography. The concept of alcoholism has a similar genealogy. In its modern form, it appeared in the context of a liberalization of alcohol policy following American prohibition. Yet as Valverde writes in Diseases of the Will (1998, 1) “alcohol has been problematized for at least 150 years, not only at the level of individual consumption but also at the level of national populations.” During the early 1900s most Canadian provinces experimented with forms of partial prohibition. In the 1920s prohibition gave way to government monopoly of retail sale for off-premise consumption. Alcohol, especially when consumed in public, was deemed to be a dangerous commodity and the “liquor traffic” placed under strict controls. Provincial liquor commissions adopted a middle course between total liberalization and restriction, guided by public order and revenue considerations. Beginning in the 1940s, the debate on liquor was partly medicalized as a result of cultural change, scientific research and the spread of the Alcoholics Anonymous mutual support movement (Single et al. 1981) . This paper examines how the federal and provincial governments responded to problems such as “alcoholism,” “problem drinking” and “fetal alcohol effects” in the last half of the 20th century. Why bother to revisit the recent history of state responses to “alcohol problems?” Because the discourse and public policy on the nature, prevention and treatment of alcoholism may clarify certain aspects of the recent debate surrounding gambling. “Gaming” has been problematised as a social issue not on broad ethical or ideological grounds, or according to “epidemiological” evidence, but as an individualized pathology. In this paper I argue that alcohol policy, although not totally successful in destigmatizing alcohol abuse, helped pave the way for liberalization of gaming by shifting the blame for social problems from producers, purveyors and government, onto the individual drinker. An additional possible line of questioning, to test the common interpretation in the historiography of the welfare state that “when one group in society designs policy for another, the result will prove intrusive and to some degree authoritarian,” is beyond the scope of this study (Muncy, 1991, 164). The paper asks four basic questions: (1) how were 20th-century alcohol problems framed? (2) what public treatment programmes developed? (3) what types of prevention programmes were established? (4) what can the recent history of alcohol problems suggest about current and future policies on “gambling problems?” I. Framing alcohol problems Any “public” problem, such as tobacco use, impaired driving or crack cocaine, first must be identified through new forms of social or expert knowledge. Opium manufacturing, distribution and use were criminalized only in 1908, as a result of racially-influenced moral reform concerns. Impaired driving did not become a critical issue in terms of criminal law until the late 1960s (Marquis 2001c). For much of the 20th century, tobacco was not a public health issue and insurance companies did not even ask clients whether they smoked (Cunningham 1996, 43). The nineteenth century temperance movement, and the early twentieth century prohibition movement, 2 blamed alcohol for most social problems, from poverty and poor health to immorality and crime. Although accepting the theory that alcohol was dangerous and possibly unchristian, temperance, with its focus on voluntary action, had emphasized restraint and total abstinence by individuals. When the strategy of total abstinence and moral suasion failed to curb alcohol abuses, temperance activists rooted in Protestant evangelical churches called for legal and political action. Rather than work exclusively to curb demand, they targeted supply, notably the saloon. Prohibitionists, reflecting the concerns of social critics in the late 1800s, promoted the political theory of the “liquor traffic,” a powerful vested interest that had corrupted public life and spread ruin and misery (Marquis 2001a). Although temperance ideology stressed that the liquor traffic affected all levels of society, moral reformers tended to regard the working class and immigrants as its most vulnerable and problematic victims. In the second decade of the twentieth century, prohibitionists became better organized, and by adopting social reformist, efficiency and, during World War I, patriotic arguments, managed to garner support from moderate voters. Many provincial governments, rather than take a clear stand on liquor control, promised to follow the wishes of the electorate through plebiscites. The drys not only won most of the plebiscites, their organizations actually drafted the legislation that implemented partial prohibition in many of the following jurisdictions (Smart and Ogborne 1996, 49): British Columbia: 1917-21 Alberta: 1916-24 Saskatchewan: 1916-25 Manitoba: 1916-24 Ontario: 1916-27 New Brunswick: 1917-27 Prince Edward Island: 1907-48 Nova Scotia: 1916-30 Aside from a period of war-related federal prohibition that lasted until 1919, the Canadian form of prohibition, as a result of necessary political compromises, was rarely “bone dry.” Liquor stores and saloons did close. But breweries and distilleries continued to operate, liquor companies exported stock within and beyond Canada, customers could legally purchase mail order packaged liquor from outside their province and low- alcohol beer continued to be sold in hotels. Following World War I federal permissive legislation gave provinces the right to close the importation loophole. In 1921, for example, Ontario voters ended legal importation. The

Load more