Wine and Addiction: A Discussion with Robin Room

On 28 January 2026, I sat down with Professor Robin Room over a Teams call to discuss his influential research on alcohol, which began in the early 1960s and continues today. He was speaking to me from his crowded, book-lined study in Melbourne. Despite decades in the U.S., his strong Australian accent, intellectual generosity, and warmth made talking with him a pleasure. His enthusiasm for the all-too-human propensity to enjoy alcohol, illegal drugs, and gambling was palpable.

This is a partial transcript of our conversation.

[JB: Let’s begin by you telling us about your distinguished career as an expert on alcohol. You are renowned for your epidemiological, social and cultural studies of alcohol practices, problems and policy. Although much of your career was spent in the U.S., especially as the head of the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley, but you also worked in Canada and Stockholm before returning to Australia as the Professor of Alcohol Policy Research and then Director of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at La Trobe. Among the way, you have won numerous awards, written 35 books, 550 articles, more than 130 book chapters, and more than 50 reports. You are also editor-in-chief of the journal Drug and Alcohol Review. How do you do it! And what are your personal highlights?]

RR: I’m a sociologist by training. I have a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley and in the course of that, I got a summer job at something called the California Drinking Practices Study, which was run by a psychiatrist who also had a PhD in sociology [Professor Genevieve Knupfer, 1914-2005]. It’s very unusual for people to do both psychiatry and sociology. She’d got her sociology PhD at Columbia, which was the most famous U.S. university for sociology in her generation. There were three or four sociologists working under her, of whom I was one. When she retired, I eventually became the head of the place.

We were looking at drinking in the general population. And that was pretty new at that point in the 1960s. Up till then, a lot of the literature about alcoholism was essentially around the model of Alcoholics Anonymous. But even though Genevieve was a psychiatrist herself, she was really not particularly interested in that sort of mainline psychiatric view, but more in what happened with drinking in the general population. A majority of people in countries like Australia, the US, or Britain drink at some point, and there’s a smaller set of people who are heavy drinkers.

Drinking is very much a collective activity for most people. The collective nature of drinking was something that we emphasised. It was not emphasised at all in the psychiatric literature. If you look at people who are in a social world of heavy drinking, then they have plenty of folk in the social world who are encouraging them to drink more. And then there are various people in their family who are encouraging them to drink less. Drinking wasn’t simply a matter of a person’s psychology.

[JB: Yes, that was what was so innovative in your work -- cultures of drinking or the socio-cultural aspects of alcohol consumption. Can you talk us through those concepts?]

RR: If you look at social worlds of heavy drinking, they tend to be organised around something that people have in common, whether it be their occupation or a hobby or the fact that they tend to go to a particular hotel to drink. People who are relatively heavy drinkers move in at least one world in which their drinking is taken for granted and the people around them are also drinking. The crucial thing about Alcoholics Anonymous, if you want to look at it in terms of what was special about it, was that it kept that collective nature of getting together, but this time it was around not drinking. That was not something that got emphasised in the psychiatric literature, but is quite important if people were going to give up drinking. They would have lost their regular friendship group; they needed some other kind of friendship group, essentially.

[JB: So, Alcoholics Anonymous was effective in giving people a different social network within which they could remake their lives?]

RR: I’m mostly talking about English-speaking cultures: the US, Britain, and Australia. They are all countries which had a very strong temperance movement, starting in the eighteenth century in the US and the nineteenth century in places like Australia.

Women were the heart of the temperance movement. The Women's Christian Temperance Union was a worldwide collection of folk. There was a period that lasted until the 1930s or 1940s, when if you asked about women and drinking it was mainly about their opposition to men’s drinking. This began to fall apart after the 1920s. In the 1920s, in many of those countries, there was a period of prohibition, or six pm closing in Australia. The temperance movement had some effect on the availability of alcohol, so college kids of the 1920s revolted against that. For the first time, women showed up publicly drinking. There’s a book called Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties [by Marion Meade, 2004]. It’s about women writers in that period, who were leaders in the revolt against temperance. But it took a long time for women’s drinking to rise in the general population. If I think about when I was growing up in Australia, born in 1939, my parents did very little drinking at home. People drank in pubs and Australian pubs at that point closed or stopped serving alcohol at six pm. And pubs were not a place for women There might be a women’s room which was separate from the main part. [JB: the Ladies Parlour – I have a chapter on them!] It’s not the until the late fifties and sixties that you begin to get the women drinking in pubs. [JB: you mean middle- and upper-class women; working women were prominent in British pubs.] That changed the world considerably. But, still, if you go look at the world as a whole, three-quarters of the alcohol in the world is drunk by men. In a country like Britain or Australia, men are still drinking more than the women, but not a whole lot more.

[JB: I like the attention you pay to culture and context. As you wrote, the consumption of ethanol ‘does not determine whether behavior is disinhibited or controlled: it simply provides an empty vessel of altered consciousness for culture, circumstances, and personality to load with meanings and explanations’. Lovely sentence! Can you explain?]

RR: When you have a drink or two, then your consciousness changes slightly, and if you have more than a couple of drinks, then you experience much more of a change. The question is, what meaning do you put on that change or what happens in the course of that change? It’s partly influenced by the fact that you’ll often be drinking with other people. So there’s something collective going on about your consciousness; people are influencing each other. But whether it means that you turn mean or you turn friendly, et cetera, the direction you turn is partly due to the circumstances, partly has something to do with your own psychology, but is quite variable. If you’re drinking along with other people, then the other people in the group will put some kinds of limits on you. We need to think about that collective nature of the occasion, as well as about what’s going on within your own body and mind.

[JB: Language is really important – the differences between terms such as ‘addiction’, ‘inebriety’, or ‘alcoholism’. How do you refer to heavy drinking/drinkers?]

RR: I am not sure how careful I am, but avoid medicalized language, which converts it immediately into a disease, and often a single disease rather than noticing the differences, the nuances. The term ‘alcoholic’ allows people to wash their hands of making sense of it: ‘oh, he’s an alcoholic’. The tendency of medicalized terms is to lump everything together. It all started with Jellinek [Elvin Morton Jellinek, 1940s and 50s], with his disease concept of alcoholism.

[JB: There’s still this stigma associated with women drinking and also lots of fears associated with female drinking – fears that constrain women’s lives. My book is a celebration of female cultures of drinking.]

RR: It’s really interesting that you are paying attention to women’s drinking because it really is not the first step that the world takes when thinking about drinking.

This is part of a series of interviews I have conducted with influential academics who explore cultures of alcohol-drinking. They include an interview in this series of blogs with Professor Robert Fuller.