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AIM-This article explores the multiplicity of former heavy drinkers' narratives. The focus lies on turning points from heavy drinking among people who have recovered through self-change and among those who recovered by participating in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings. DESIGN-We conducted 42 qualitative interviews with media-recruited informants in 2009-2013. The interviews allowed the respondents to narrate their life histories of drinking and quitting drinking, including accounts of causality and order of events. RESULTS-These narratives are enactments shaped in the practice and context in which they were experienced. It is argued that the multiplicity of drinking narratives results not only from the fact that people have different experiences while drinking nor only from different people having different ways of recovering from a problematic consumption. The multiplicity is also the result of the very enactment of recovering and the lives lived after the recovery. The multiplicity is created in practice and is revealed in the narratives. CONCLUSIONS-The narratives and the enactment of the narratives of one's past, present and future that occur when making momentous changes in one's life-such as stopping drinkingare all essential for the process of quitting alcohol and the life to be lived hereafter. We should therefore pay more attention to the multiplicity that is created in the enactment of narratives in the process of recovery.

AIMS-To describe and explain changes in public opinions regarding alcohol consumption and policy in Denmark in recent decades. Since the late 1990s Danish alcohol policy has become more restrictive, and alcohol consumption has decreased. METHODS AND DATA-Five national surveys and one Nordic survey (1985, 1989, 1994, 1997/98, 2002 and 2011) were reviewed, and the data regarding attitudes towards alcohol consumption and alcohol political questions were identified and compared. RESULTS-Although Danes perceive the total alcohol consumption to be rather high, there is no support for a more restrictive alcohol policy. CONCLUSIONS-There is no clear direction regarding the development of attitudes toward different alcohol political questions over time. There is no support for the regulation of alcohol price or availability. Danes seem to view alcohol consumption as a private issue that requires self-control and self-discipline more than political intervention. KEYWORDS-alcohol policy, attitudes, changes in public opinions.

Danish alcohol policy is known to be liberal even if from the middle of the 1990s it has been going in a more restrictive direction. The most important Danish policy instrument has been education and information, where policymakers have attempted to change alcohol habits by changing public attitudes to alcohol consumption and possible regulations. The aim of this article is to examine whether Danish attitudes to governmental alcohol policy instruments and regulations have changed during the last 20 years – and if so, what directions these changes have taken. Five surveys on alcohol consumption and opinions on different alcohol policy instruments and regulations – from 1984, 1989, 1994, 1997/98 and 2002 – have been examined. All five surveys are cross-sectional studies with populations of representative samples of the Danish population age 18”70 yrs. Comparative analysis has been carried out on questions from the different surveys relating to opinions on: alcohol prices and taxation, alcohol and work, drinking alcohol in public places, compulsory treatment, experienced harms and inconveniences caused by intoxicated persons, and the physical availability of alcohol. The results show that Danish attitudes on alcohol policy instruments and regulation seems to go in two directions – when it comes to prising and taxation, drinking in public places, and availability, the changes in attitudes point in a more liberal direction, while when it comes to young peoples access to alcohol, compulsory treatment, and intoxication, changes in attitudes point in a more restrictive direction.

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