(9 of 10)
In the typical industrial program, a supervisor, noticing an employee's work slipping, alerts a counselor. If the counselor's investigation finds that alcohol is the culprit, he calls the man in and recommends a treatment-and-rehabilitation plan that falls under the company's medical insurance coverage. There will be no stigma attached if he enters the plan, the counselor tells him, and if he successfully completes it, his career will not be hurt. "If they do not want to go for treatment," says Jack Shevlin, an alcohol counselor in Illinois Bell Telephone's pioneering program, the answer is in effect: "Of course you do—if you want your job."
The results have been more than en couraging, and in most programs about 90% of the alcoholic employees do elect treatment. When a company puts its weight behind an employee's rehabilitation, the chances of success are better than 2 in 3, say doctors at Lutheran General, which works with 52 companies in the Chicago area.
Halfway Houses. Government at all levels has become sensitive to the alcoholic's plight—and the enormous damage that he wreaks. Since 1970, when Congress demonstrated Washington's changed attitude by passing an alcohol abuse and alcoholism act, a score of states have enacted laws that remove drunkenness (though not drunken driving) from the criminal statutes. Thus drunks are no longer put in jail. Other places, however, must be provided to receive them. These are called Local Alcoholism Reception Centers (or LARC), where the alcoholics are detoxified. They then graduate to "halfway" houses for outpatient treatment. Because LARC makes a strenuous effort to reach alcohol abusers early, the centers can usually help improve the physical condition, earning ability and family situation of their patients.
Sparked by Iowa's Senator Harold Hughes, who is himself a rehabilitated alcoholic, the Government has begun an expensive program to combat alcoholism through research, education and funding of local programs. Starting with $70 million in 1971, federal spending has now reached $194 million. Eighty-five percent of this amount is allotted to treatment, rehabilitation centers and halfway houses, many of which would no doubt still be only token efforts without substantial federal funding to the states.