Last week's post on the startling death rate among Russian men from drinking alcohol not meant to be a beverage struck a chord with many readers. And it made me realize that I have not lived up to an early promise I made to this blog, which was to explore the impact of Russia's alcohol troubles on adoption. Yes, there are problems: Even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged that in his speeches. But concerns about the impact of a birth mother's drinking on her child can often hold people back from considering any adoption from Russia. I wanted to make it my goal to help prospective parents understand where and when they need to be concerned about alcohol.

And so it was that I found myself carving out time to read a book that I had been meaning to read for some time: Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The author, Janet Golden, is a Rutgers University history professor. And what she has done in this book is create a history of how a scientific discovery became a medical, social, cultural and even criminal issue. Golden is not writing about Russia; there's only the barest reference at the end of her book to FAS being an issue in international adoption. But I believe that before I can understand how people view the impact of alcohol on children in Russia, I have to understand what has shaped their thinking about alcohol in America.

And as Golden clearly points out, there have been many efforts to shape that thinking. Prior to the work of Dr. Kenneth Lyons Jones and Dr. David W. Smith, who coined the term Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in an article in the British medical journal Lancet in 1973, alcohol consumption by pregnant women was viewed largely as a socio-economic problem. Their children were impaired, for reasons not clearly understood, and addressing those impairments had a cost for society. Jones and Smith were the first to document that alcohol was a teratogen--something that causes birth defects.

But the debate that follows their discovery--which Golden deftly chronicles--made me realize that we, as a society, spend much too much time looking for blame and not enough time looking for solutions. Does it really help to determine whether alcoholism is a medical or a criminal issue? I would much rather have seen the 34 years that have followed the Jones-Smith discovery spent on improving the lives of women so they would be less tempted to drink, and most certainly on finding therapies, treatments and strategies to help the children they bore to become productive citizens.