Ruth Fox Convenes Physicians in New York and Alcoholism Becomes a Medical Question

Addiction medicine treats substance dependence as a diagnosable medical condition with standardized screening and treatment protocols, rather than as purely a matter of individual willpower or moral character. The physician Ruth Fox began holding regular meetings with colleagues interested in alcoholism treatment at the New York Academy of Medicine in the early 1950s, and in 1954 that group formally established the New York City Medical Society on Alcoholism with Fox as its first president, the organization that eventually grew into the American Society of Addiction Medicine and gave the field its first professional medical body.

Ritual and sacramental use of alcohol, tobacco, entheogens and other substances appears across many traditions, and addiction medicine gives the atlas an independent clinical basis for describing where such use carries a documented dependence risk, distinct from a tradition's own account of the practice as purely spiritual or purely social. The atlas draws on the discipline wherever a described ritual practice involves a substance whose physiological dependence potential is clinically documented, without treating the ritual context itself as either excusing or aggravating that risk.