Why Would I Care about the NIAAA?

As a layperson, why in heck would the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) matter to me? Here are a few reasons:

• As a U.S. citizen and taxpayer, it spends almost a half billion bucks of my money every year.
• Like other parts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), it is supposed to provide a scientific foundation for understanding health issues.
• The NIAAA is a key player in setting standards, definitions, and thresholds for things like moderate drinking, binge drinking, and treatment.
• Research, as funded and interpreted by the NIAAA, has a lot to do with the kinds of information, support, and treatment that are available to me.
• Like any organization, the quality of the results produced and/or funded by the NIAAA is going to be as good (or as limited) as the expectations set for it by the public (i.e., me and you).
• The NIH is not immune from conflicts of interest and other flaws.

So, if the NIAAA assigns a low priority to understanding the full spectrum of options (harm reduction, motivational enhancement, moderation) for folks who abuse alcohol like I have in the past, the chances that other folks will have those sorts of options available to them decreases.

If the NIAAA emphasizes research into relapse among folks who pursue all available treatment options any yet don’t reverse the severity of their binges, the chances of finding more effective options increases.

And, if the primary focus of the NIAAA is on discovering genetic markers which appear to contribute to drinking problems, there is likely to be less focus on how to help folks assert personal responsibility in the face of alcohol abuse.

In other health issues, it has often been the folks most directly affected who have driven research concerns. Parents of kids with autism have challenged the NIH to look closely at the possibility that common vaccines have contributed to their kids’ challenges. Breast cancer survivors, and family members of those who did not survive, have been the most effective advocates for increasing the dollars devoted to prevention and treatment research.

If I want to see alcohol-related care shift, I gotta be one of the folks standing up and challenging the research gurus to cover all of the bases, and holding the folks in charge accountable for spending public dollars.