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Source: 1965 Toronto International Convention – 1965 Toronto Int. Director NCA Carl H Morgan 16 min.mp3 File: 1965-toronto-international-convention-1965-toronto-int-director-nca-carl-h-morgan-16-min.mp3 Duration: 00:16:54
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Our next speaker, Mr. Carl H. Morgan, was asked if he would speak in place of Mr. Morgan, and without any hesitation he said he would be very glad to do so. I had dinner with this gentleman last evening and met him for the first time, and oddly enough during the course of our dinner it came out that some forty years ago my brother worked for him, and also he was associated in a company with one of my mother's brothers.
So now I can't wait till I get home to tell them about our next speaker. He is the vice president of manufacturing of the Kennedy Value Manufacturing Company of Elmira, New York. He is a director and has been a director of the National Council on Alcoholism since 1962. He is one of the founders of the Chemung County Council on Alcoholism and has served as president of that council for three years. He has been very active in developing and encouraging industrial alcoholism programs, and I have great pleasure to introduce to you who will speak on the subject of the National Council on Alcoholism, Mr. Carl H. Morgan.
Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan. Thank you, Bruce. I've been thinking since this session opened this morning with somewhat mixed emotions, wondering if there was a little sly going on in Cora Louise's ban on taking photographs. And what I've been wondering about is that was this a subtle way of saying there's no use, folks, to taking many pictures here this morning because a reflection from the speaker's table is going to ruin them all.
I had an experience last night, which I wish had happened many years ago, as we sat there in the gardens. I haven't heard or seen any figures, but I assume there were probably 10,000 people seated there to listen to messages on alcoholism. And I presume from my own proclivities of trying to make estimates of this, that, and the other thing, that something more than half of those people were recovered alcoholics.
I would guess that if there were 10,000 there, probably 7,000 to 7,500 of them were recovered alcoholics. So this, to me, is an enormous event, something that I wouldn't have missed for anything in the world and caught me by complete surprise. I hadn't known what to expect. And now, knowing what to expect, I think I'd travel halfway around the world to repeat the experience. And the thought flashed through my mind as I sat there. We were rather well up in the tiers where I could get a first-class view of what was in the audience.
And I thought of the message that I think was attributed to Alexander Graham Bell at the time the first voice came over the first telephone, what hath God wrought. And as I sat there looking down last night, I thought, this hath God wrought. It was wonderful, ladies and gentlemen. NCA has always thought of itself as a prime ally of AA. In fact, the first name suggested for it was Friends of AA. This title was not used simply because there was some question as to whether the rank and file of AA people would like it.
NCA's primary objective then and now was to do those things in the field of alcoholism that AA itself could not do or did not wish to do or were prevented from doing by its tenets and principles. First and foremost, NCA's purpose was and is to enlighten the public about alcoholism, to give the public the facts about the problem, to remove the stigma which lay so heavily upon alcoholism, and to clear the way for constructive action in all of the areas where such action was needed.
[00:05:03]
In giving the public the facts about alcoholism, NCA utilized three basic concepts. One, alcoholism is a disease and the alcoholic a sick person. Two, the alcoholic can be helped and is worth helping. And three, this is a public health problem and therefore a public responsibility. In 1944, when these concepts were first put forth, they were revolutionary. Most people thought of alcoholism as a moral problem, a matter of willpower on the part of the individual.
This was a far cry from the thought that alcoholism is a sickness, an illness, or a disease. In reality, there was nothing new about this situation since science wrote of it in 1778 as a disease. Dr. Benjamin Rush, in a book published in 1802, referred to chronic and continual drunkenness as a vicious disease. In 1830, the Connecticut legislature received a resolution from the Connecticut Medical Society calling alcoholism a disease with special problems and calling upon the legislature to build a hospital for the treatment of the victims of alcoholism.
And this was 135 years ago. Yet in 1944, when Mrs. Marty Mann was giving thought to the formation of a national voluntary health agency to work exclusively in the field of alcoholism, the bulk of the American people and the majority of American physicians as well as scientific investigators did not accept alcoholism as a disease. It became one of NCA's major efforts to get some expression or opinion on this matter from the American Medical Association.
And this finally occurred in 1956 when the AMA House of Delegates, by unanimous vote, passed a resolution that alcoholism was a disease and was a responsibility of the medical profession. This, mind you, after some 12 years of constant hammering by Mrs. Mann and her staff at NCA. The second concept was equally revolutionary in 1944 since the bulk of the people were not fully aware of Alcoholics Anonymous or the fact that a majority of alcoholics could recover if they were just given the chance.
The proof of this second concept lay in the members of AA who had recovered and had returned to normal living. Without that living proof, NCA could not possibly have undertaken its work. This has always been stated by NCA when speaking or writing for the public. The third concept stating that this was a public health problem was directed specifically against the then current view that alcoholism was a moral problem belonging first to the church since it dealt with ethics and morals and second, if the church could not handle it, to the law for punishment.
The statement that alcoholism is a public health problem takes it out of these two categories and places it where it belongs, in the realm of public health. The efforts to reach the public with these facts about alcoholism has been and remains NCA's major effort. This is carried on through the mass media as well as through lectures and the distribution of written materials, books and pamphlets on a continuing and very consistent basis.
It includes also the education of professional groups, doctors, lawyers, nurses, social workers, teachers and all others who should be concerned with alcoholism. NCA has been responsible for much of the attention given to the subject by the public press, both newspapers and magazines. Also for the myriad number of radio and TV programs on the subject which have steadily increased in numbers over the years.
This continuing effort for the dissemination of information has as its goal a complete changing of the public attitudes on the subject. Alcoholism was for too long considered hopeless and the alcoholic was in most minds the skid row bum. NCA's effort has been to make people understand that there is hope for the alcoholic and that the alcoholics are all kinds of people representing society from the top to the bottom with everything in between.
NCA has always made a special effort to show that the skid row bum so called is only a very tiny fraction of the problem and that most alcoholics were like everyone else, like all of us here, like all of us elsewhere, usually married, with children, and employed.
[00:10:05]
I think I might add that these speeches are not going in geometric ratio. We started with 12 pages and then we went to 14 and from that you might conclude that this might be 16 or 18 or 20. It isn't, I went the other way. This one's going to be only eight. The purpose of this emphasis on education was to remove the roadblocks which had for so long stood in the way of constructive action. NCA stands for constructive action on alcoholism and particularly at the community level.
NCA has always felt that the big changes will be brought about in the handling of alcoholism at the community level where the alcoholics live and where the damage done by their illness is most acutely felt. For this reason NCA's major, second major effort has been to assist communities to organize an all-out attack on alcoholism in the local community. We call these organizations local councils on alcoholism and there currently are 75 such councils on alcoholism affiliated with the National Council on Alcoholism.
When a group wishes to organize a council, NCA suggests that such a council must be representative of the total community. It must have on its board people from all walks of life and all professions. It must have people on its board and a number of recovered alcoholics, but preferably not too many. We strongly suggest that this group should be a minority, not more than 10% of the total board membership, and that we should have a composite mixture of men and women, of doctors and lawyers and all types of professional people, of social agency heads, of probation and parole people, this sort of thing, and community leaders so that strength is given to the program of attacking alcoholism at the local level.
NCA does not for this reason believe that councils on alcoholism should ever be dominated by recovered alcoholics since one of the major purposes is to interest and involve the non-alcoholic world in alcoholism. This again means that all of these people whom I mentioned, both men and women, be recruited and given active parts to play in working with alcoholism at the local level. In NCA's opinion, it is essential that people who carry this weight in the community become involved with and active in the problems of alcoholism, and this is accomplished in many ways.
When a local council is organized, NCA gives it four major objectives. One, an intensive and continuing education campaign in its own area, and two, the opening up of general hospital beds to the acutely sick alcoholic so that acute alcoholism can be accepted as a medical emergency on the same basis as any other medical emergency, and three, the establishment and maintenance of an alcoholism information center, of which more will be said later, and four, the procuring of an outpatient alcoholism clinic for its area, probably through a state alcoholism program, although this possibly can be undertaken by a local hospital or even a group of doctors.
Such a clinic is both for diagnosis and for long-term treatment of alcoholism, and today there are 158 such clinics throughout the United States. The alcoholism information center is the main activity of a local council on alcoholism. It is the heart of the council's activities and the major service that it offers to the community. The alcoholism information center has two distinct functions, to act as a headquarters for the council and to serve as a disseminator of education through all possible means.
Education programs are planned and undertaken by the staff of the information center, and they include not only work with the mass media, but the putting on of public meetings, institutes, seminars, workshops, and every other kind of educational device that can be thought of to reach general and special groups in the community. The information that goes out of the information center inevitably reaches friends, families, and employers of alcoholics, and even many alcoholics themselves.
This brings us to the second function of the information center. Information and consult, and consultation regarding a… and consult and consultation regarding a particular problem of alcoholism given to families, friends, employers, and to alcoholics themselves.
[00:15:07]
The information center is not a treatment center, but refers the people who come there for help to a treatment resource. If possible, they are referred directly to Alcoholics Anonymous, or if it is the family, to Al-Anon. If they are unable or unwilling to accept this referral, even after intensive interpretation of what AA is, then they may be sent to a hospital or to a clinic or to a doctor or to other agencies who may be indicated for the help desired.
The Alcoholism Information Center is a bridge to AA and to other sources of help. It has always been thought of in these terms by MCA. It has one particular aspect which has enabled it to reach many alcoholics who would not go anywhere else, and that is that it is neutral ground. Many alcoholics and their families are fearful of going direct to AA or Al-Anon or to a clinic or to a doctor or to a hospital.
In the case of the alcoholic, he is afraid that he is walking into a cage and that the gate will slam behind him. If he goes to AA, to a doctor, or to a clinic, he is in effect committing himself. But if he goes to an information center, he goes as any other individual coming to ask for information. And there is no commitment. So many alcoholics go to information centers asking for information for a friend.
This gets to be an old story. It's worked so very, very often. The highly trained people in the centers are very familiar with this procedure, and they handle the situation in such a way that the alcoholic usually, in a very short time, admits that he is the friend.