AFTER THE CRASH.

• Author: Peele, Stanton
• Position: Problems associated with allowing treated alcoholics to drink

The alcoholism treatment establishment uses a drunk driving accident to silence dissent.

About 6 p.m. on March 25, Audrey Kishline was driving west on the eastbound side of Interstate 90 near Seattle when her Ford pickup truck collided head-on with a Dodge coupe occupied by Richard Davis, 38, and his 12-year-old daughter, LaSchell, killing both of them. Kishline had a half-empty vodka bottle on the seat beside her when police found her, unconscious, in her truck. Her blood-alcohol level was 0.26 percent, more than three times Washington's legal limit for drivers. Three months later, she pleaded guilty to two counts of vehicular homicide in Kittitas County Superior Court.

The crash, however tragic and avoidable, would have been no more newsworthy than the thousands of other drunk driving accidents in which Americans are killed each year were it not for the fact that Kishline is the author of the 1994 book Moderate Drinking and founder of Moderation Management, an organization aimed at helping problem drinkers control their alcohol consumption. (I wrote an introduction to the book and served as an adviser to M.M.) To longtime critics of the "controlled drinking" Kishline espoused as an alternative to the abstinence urged by Alcoholics Anonymous and its imitators, the crash was a vindication. The National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence (NCADD)--a private group that, like A.A., considers alcoholism a disease that can be controlled only through abstinence--gloated in a press release that Kishline's crash taught a "harsh lesson for all of society, particularly those individuals who collude with the media to continually question abstinence-based treatment for problems relat ed to alcohol and other drugs."

Yet Kishline's one brief statement to the press revealed some facts that ran counter to the NCADD's interpretation. "Two months before the crash," The Seattle Times reported, "she dropped out of the [M.M.] program and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. But it wasn't long before she was consuming so much wine at night she would drink herself to sleep." In other words, Kishline, who belonged to A.A. before founding M.M., had returned. Only then, it appears, did her drinking veer out of control.

Of course, it is as unfair to blame A.A. for the Kishline tragedy as it is to blame M.M. She was apparently experiencing family and financial difficulties that had thrown her life off kilter after seven years of moderate drinking. While M.M. attracted media attention, it had never provided a reliable source of income. Kishline's husband was an itinerant businessman, and she had moved with him four times in the previous seven years. They and their two young daughters ended up living with her in-laws in a small town outside Seattle. But whatever the circumstances of Kishline's relapse, it is a mark of ideological intransigence and intellectual dishonesty that critics such as the NCADD do not note that she was regularly attending A.A. at the time of the crash.

Kishline's story is not just a tale of personal despair and failure. It embodies centuries of American conflict over alcohol in which teetotalers have repeatedly clashed with advocates of moderation. Having failed to impose their vision on the rest of the nation through Prohibition, the forces of abstinence nowadays focus mainly on problem drinkers...