The richest nation in the world has problems to match its affluence. Alcoholism has become America's fourth biggest killer disease-after cancer, heart disease, and mental illness - and of the six million alcoholics in the U.S. today, seventy per cent are not to be found on Skid Row. They live with their families, attend church, pay taxes, educate their children, and continue to function on just the edge of social acceptability as farmers, teachers, clergymen, doctors, and housewives. In the first of a two-part inquiry into alcoholism, Man Alive looks at alcoholics and their families from Long Island to California, visits them in prison, and investigates what happens to them in treatment clinics: and then asks ' Is this the way to deal with the problem? '