The idea that alcoholism or problem drinking is a disease has been growing in popularity for the last 20 or 30 years. During this same period, professionals treating and researching alcohol problems have come to regard that theory as deeply misleading and unhelpful. There is a large gap between the popular and the specialist view of the subject and much confusion. This article attempts to communicate to the nonspecialist the new scientific understanding of alcoholism and the evidence on which it is based. The authors claim that: (1) the drinking behavior of alcoholics obeys the same kind of laws and changes in response to the same kind of influences as the drinking of non-alcoholics; (2) drinking problems are not irreversible in principle and many problem drinkers can return to harm-free patterns of drinking; (3) problem drinking is a learned habitual behavior; and (4) drinking must be understood and treated in the social context in which it has developed and which maintains it. The authors conclude that society should stop trying to ignore alcohol problems by putting the blame for them on individual alcoholics, as in the disease view. Instead, the problems should be regarded as a matter of collective responsibility in which the whole of society is involved.