Shortly after 9 o'clock on the morning of Dec. 3, 1997, the 14 members of the Governor's Task Force on Driving While Intoxicated and Vehicular Homicide took their seats in a hearing room in the Louisiana State Capitol Building in Baton Rouge. The issue before them: whether the state should add a provision to Louisiana's drinking law that would prohibit 18- to 20-year-olds from entering bars. The law currently allows them into bars, even while it prohibits them from buying or drinking alcohol. The law is widely flouted, however, and most of the task-force members -- highway officials, state legislators, local sheriffs, a representative from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) -- were united on the need to change what they saw as a loophole. The loophole, they believed, was encouraging college students to spend their nights carousing rather than studying. They also felt it was contributing to the carnage on the state's highways. In 1995, Louisiana had 883 traffic fatalities, of which slightly more than half were alcohol-related -- the third highest rate in the country.

In seeking to close the loophole, however, the task force faced a formidable obstacle: Charles Tapp, one of its members. A lobbyist for the state alcohol industry, the silver-haired, tart-tongued Tapp was on the attack from the moment the first witness was seated. "You're the executive director of what organization?" he snarled at Sharron Ayers, who represented the Louisiana Alliance to Prevent Under-Age Drinking, a coalition of grass-roots groups, state agencies and private organizations. Closing the loophole, she said, would make it harder for young people to drink.

"Why do you call it a loophole?" Tapp asked gruffly.

"It makes it very hard for law enforcement to enforce the law," Ayers replied, uncertainty creeping into her voice. "It's had a lot of effects on young people. They're out drinking, not studying. You know what happened recently at L.S.U."

Ayers was referring to the fateful night in August when several fraternity members at Louisiana State University dropped by Murphy's, a local bar. There they downed pitchers of a potent concoction called Three Wise Men -- 151-proof rum, Crown Royal whisky and Jagermeister, a sweet liqueur. By midnight the students were so drunk that they had to be wheeled out in shopping carts to waiting cars. After they returned to their frat house, the campus police were alerted, and, rushing over, they found nearly two dozen people passed out. Four of them had to be hospitalized, and one, a 20-year-old named Benjamin Wynne, died. An autopsy found that his blood-alcohol content was six times over Louisiana's legal intoxication limit. Generating headlines nationwide, the event had strengthened the task force's conviction that it was time to act.

"What would you do about an 18-year-old student who works in a bar?" Tapp snapped.

"We don't have that defined yet," Ayers admitted.

"What about a 19-year-old who owns a bar?" he pressed on.

"What we are concerned with is the average student going into bars," she replied.

"What do you mean by average student?"

"The average 18-, 19- and 20-year-old who goes into a lounge. We don't know whether their purpose in going in is to drink, but we do know they are drinking."

"Do you know that?" Tapp challenged her. "Oh, we know about what happened at L.S.U., but were they going in to play pool, maybe, and not drinking?"

By the end of her testimony, Ayers was literally shaking. And so it went for the rest of the three-hour hearing. After Dr. Deborah Cohen, a professor at the L.S.U. Medical Center, expressed her support for closing the loophole, Tapp accused her of engaging in "social" legislation. "We've seen a tremendous movement in that direction in the last three to four years," he said. At several points, Tapp asserted that because the state's legal age of majority is 18, any effort to close the loophole would constitute age discrimination.

Watching Tapp's performance, his fellow panel members struggled to keep their cool, waiting for the final vote to express their own views. It went 13 to 1 in favor of recommending that the Governor, M.J. (Mike) Foster, a Republican, introduce a bill to close the loophole and make it illegal for 18- to 20-year-olds to enter bars. For the state's alcohol-control forces, it was a sweet victory, if a small one.

In recent months, citizens' groups across the nation have been organizing against the alcohol industry. Spurred by growing concerns over drunk driving, under-age drinking and alcohol-related crime, these groups -- made up of parents and educators, churchgoers and community activists -- have been pressing for higher taxes, restrictions on advertising and crackdowns on problem outlets. Not since Prohibition has the alcohol industry been so under siege. But Big Alcohol is not about to go the way of Big Tobacco. Aggressive, flush with cash and fortified with lessons from the war on cigarettes, the alcohol lobby is fighting back with the many weapons at its command.

In Louisiana, its chief weapon is George Brown. The executive director of Louisiana's Beer Industry League (and Tapp's boss), Brown is considered by many to be the state's most powerful lobbyist. He has known virtually every Governor in the last 30 years and is on a first-name basis with many state legislators. At the league's office, a red-brick bungalow a few blocks from the Capitol building, Brown and his staff frequently play host at fund-raisers for candidates, with the beer flowing free of charge.

The influence of Brown and the Beer Industry League generally is apparent in Louisiana's lax alcohol laws. "Laissez les bon temps rouler" is the state's informal motto, and with a total of nearly 13,000 places where you can buy alcohol, it's easy to see why the good times keep rolling. Many gas stations sell beer, wine and spirits, allowing you to stock up while filling your tank; some cities and parishes have drive-in daiquiri stands. There is no last call in New Orleans, and for those wanting to carry their drinks onto the street -- it is legal to drink in public in the city -- bars keep plastic "go cups" on hand.

The day after the task-force meeting, I went to see George Brown. A crusty, balding 74-year-old, he motioned me into a chair across from him. Looking around his office, I saw that its walls were covered with photos of Brown with various state luminaries. When I mentioned the 13-to-1 task-force vote in favor of closing the loophole, he seemed unconcerned. For this was only a recommendation; both the Governor and the Legislature had to act on it for it to become law. "I promise you, there's going to be a good fight on this," Brown said with a twinkle.

To reinforce the point, he handed me a list of upcoming fund-raisers for state legislators, pointing out those the Beer Industry League was supporting. He also alluded to the backing he could expect from restaurateurs, bar owners, casino operators and other members of the state's powerful "hospitality industry." On top of it all, Brown noted, he could count on the help of Anheuser-Busch, the beer giant, which had its own lobbyist in Baton Rouge. "He may know somebody I don't," he observed genially. "That might be good for a vote or two." All in all, Brown did not seem to be a man about to panic.

The growing outcry over tobacco as a public-health menace has raised the inevitable question, Is Booze Next? Smoking is far more lethal than drinking, claiming an estimated 400,000 lives a year to alcohol's 110,000. But most of tobacco's victims are well along in years, while alcohol cuts down many in their primes. About 28,000 die from cirrhosis of the liver; more than 17,000 perish in traffic accidents. Alcohol is a factor in about half of all robberies, homicides and rapes, as it is in many cases of child abuse and wife battering. Fetal alcohol syndrome is the leading preventable cause of birth defects in the Western world. "Binge" drinking, meanwhile, is widely regarded as the single-most-serious problem on college campuses. Overall, some 14 million Americans suffer from alcohol abuse or alcoholism. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol causes "more economic and social damage than any other public-health problem."

It is not simply these glum statistics that spark concern. It is also the practices the industry uses to market its products -- practices that in many ways seem indistinguishable from those of tobacco. Where R.J. Reynolds had Joe Camel to tout its products, Anheuser-Busch has had a whole menagerie of lovable animals, including dogs, alligators, frogs and lizards. Like Joe, these characters have high recognition ratings among adolescents. Unlike Joe, they are regularly paraded on prime-time television. Anheuser-Busch was the single-largest advertiser during the last Super Bowl, buying four minutes to show Louie the Lizard's efforts to electrocute the popular frogs. Miller Brewing, meanwhile, ran its own Super Bowl promotion -- a contest to select "cheerleaders" to send to the event. Not many cheerleaders are over 21.

A few politicians have tried to make an issue of this. William Kennard, the recently appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for a study of liquor advertising on television. Representative Joseph Kennedy Jr. (Democrat of Massachusetts), a longtime industry adversary, has introduced a bill to discourage drinking that, among other things, would restrict the types of ads that could appear on prime-time television. Last summer, Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat of West Virginia) introduced a bill to eliminate the tax deductibility of money spent on alcohol advertising: alcohol, Byrd declared, was tobacco's "evil twin." And earlier this month, President Clinton publicly urged Congress to tighten the nation's laws against drunk driving.

For the most part, though, the alcohol lobby has managed to fend off these attacks. Byrd's proposal was defeated 86 to 12, and Kennedy's bill has attracted few co-sponsors. Unlike tobacco, moreover, alcohol has not been hit with many personal-liability suits. And no state has sued the industry to recoup the medical costs incurred by alcohol abuse.

As a drug, of course, alcohol differs from tobacco in several key respects. Unlike cigarettes, which are toxic in any quantity, alcohol can be consumed responsibly -- and it is by tens of millions of Americans. There is growing evidence, in fact, that moderate drinking can be beneficial, protecting against coronary disease and other killers. Then, too, alcohol executives have long acknowledged that their products can cause harm, and for years they have sponsored messages encouraging people to "know when to say when" -- a far cry from the self-immolating denials of health consequences by tobacco executives.

Such differences alone, however, cannot explain alcohol's invulnerability. An even more important factor is the industry's political power. Simply put, Big Alcohol is richer, savvier and more influential than Big Tobacco. For all its storied clout, tobacco has always been a regional product, cultivated in a handful of Southern states. By contrast, alcohol has a presence in nearly every state and city.

Consider wine. In 1997, the American wine industry racked up sales in the billions, with more than 90 percent of the wine produced by California's vintners; not surprisingly, the state's Congressional delegation is almost uniformly supportive of them. To further push their interests, the nation's vintners underwrite the Wine Institute, a $6.5 million operation with a staff of 26 in San Francisco, satellite offices in seven other cities and lobbyists in more than 40 states. The institute's Washington office is commanded by Robert Koch, a onetime staff director for Representative Richard Gephardt (Democrat of Missouri); Koch also happens to be George Bush's son-in-law.

John DeLuca, the Wine Institute's president, has long studied the travails of the tobacco companies, and he has built a whole strategy around differentiating his product from theirs. Every time a new study comes out showing alcohol's health benefits, he makes hundreds of copies and distributes them to journalists, congressmen and government officials, then follows up with phone calls and invitations to lunch. "We've worked very hard on the dietary, nutritional and life-style front," said DeLuca, a cultivated, serious man whose conversation is laced with references to vineyards, Italy and the Mediterranean diet. "People don't look on us as 'booze merchants."' It was largely because of DeLuca's prodding that for the first time, the most recent U.S. Dietary Guidelines, issued in 1995, mentioned alcohol's benefits to health, a fact the institute never fails to note in its promotional literature.

The distillers, meanwhile, are represented in Washington by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, which employs 45 and has a budget of $7.5 million. One of its largest members, Seagram, was the top "soft money" donor to the Democratic Party in 1996, giving a total of $1.2 million; its chairman, Edgar Bronfman Sr., personally donated $160,000 to the party, and his son, Edgar junior, gave $435,000. Seagram was also one of the top 10 soft-money donors to the Republican Party.

For sheer political might, however, neither wine nor spirits can compare with beer. Beer accounts for nearly 90 percent of all alcohol consumed in the United States, and it runs a political machine to match. The Beer Institute, a lobbying and public relations outfit in Washington, has an annual budget of roughly $2 million; its president, Ray McGrath, is a former congressman from Long Island. Miller Brewing has its own lobbyist in the capital and, when needed, can draw on the formidable resources of its parent, Philip Morris. Coors, meanwhile, has won political influence by financing conservative groups in Washington, including the Heritage Foundation.

'Like tobacco, alcohol imposes enormous costs on society,' says George Hacker, the undisputed general of the nation's alcohol-control forces. 'Because this is an addictive substance. And because it can be purchased 24 hours a day and is sold in colorfully packaged containers that appeal to kids.'

Then there's Anheuser-Busch. The world's largest brewer, it controls 45 percent of the American beer market; its flagship, Budweiser, sells nearly as many cases as all Miller brands combined. The company has a payroll of nearly 25,000, annual revenues of $11 billion and brewing plants in 11 states. To defend this far-flung empire, Anheuser-Busch has a lobbyist in every state capital. In Sacramento, it has Dane Starling, a retired Army general who served as Norman Schwarzkopf's right-hand man in the gulf war. In Washington, the company has two full-time lobbyists plus 13 outside agencies ready to help with everything from antitrust matters to public relations. By a happy coincidence of geography, Anheuser-Busch is situated in the Congressional district of Dick Gephardt, the House minority leader, and over the years it has contributed generously to his campaigns.

Anheuser-Busch has also backed the Democratic Party. During the 1992 Presidential campaign, Anheuser-Busch gave $105,000 to the Democratic National Committee. And during Clinton's first term, August Busch 3d, the company's chairman, was an occasional visitor to the White House; among other things, he attended the President's first state dinner, for the Emperor of Japan. In the 1996 election cycle, Anheuser-Busch donated more than $400,000 to the Democratic Party. No wonder the company's trademark Clydesdales were invited to march in the inaugural parade. More important, the Clinton Administration has not proposed a single new tax or advertising restriction on beer or alcohol generally.

No group better exemplifies big alcohol's aggressiveness than the National Beer Wholesalers Association (N.B.W.A.), which has recently emerged as one of the Republican Party's biggest backers. The beer wholesalers are the people who deliver beer from the brewery to the retailer. The typical wholesaler owns a warehouse and a fleet of trucks, has three dozen employees and takes in $9.3 million a year. Most are prominent citizens accustomed to speaking their minds. And they are found in every Congressional district, providing a powerful network that can be mobilized at a moment's notice.

The N.B.W.A. is housed in a squat, modern office building in Alexandria, Va. Its 24-person staff is directed by Ron Sarasin, a genial, polished, tanned-in-winter ex-congressman from Connecticut and former chief lobbyist for the National Restaurant Association. When Sarasin became president of the wholesalers, in 1990, it was a sleepy organization with little political influence. Just how little became clear a few months after Sarasin took over, when Congress, seeking to reduce the Federal deficit, voted to double the excise tax on beer, to $18 a barrel. It was the first such increase in 40 years, and while it did not begin to make up for inflation over that period, the industry felt it was taking a hit. Intent on boosting the beer wholesalers' presence on Capitol Hill, Sarasin enlisted the services of David Rehr.

In conservative circles, Rehr (pronounced RARE) was already something of a legend. The son of a Chicago postman, Rehr had been involved in politics since 1980, when as a student at St. John's University in central Minnesota he went to work for the Congressional campaign of a young Republican named Vin Weber. When Weber won, Rehr accompanied him to Washington, and over the next six years he got to know the new insurgent breed of House Republican (Newt Gingrich included). In 1986, Rehr joined the National Federation of Independent Business, where he honed his lobbying skills and antigovernment creed. In one memorable battle, over new health-care regulations for small businesses, Rehr defeated Dan Rostenkowski and the rest of the Democratic leadership. Impressed, Sarasin convinced him to come work for the N.B.W.A. as its vice president for government affairs.

He certainly had his work cut out for him. "On a scale of 1 to 10, the N.B.W.A. was at a 3," Rehr recalled. "My job was to take it to 7.5 and eventually to 10." We were talking in a conference room at the association's headquarters, a building whose interior is so spotless that it feels like a museum. With his smooth face, thick brown hair, crisp white shirt and tasseled loafers buffed to a military shine, the 38-year-old Rehr seemed spotless, too. Unlike many lobbyists who shun the limelight, he is expansive about his efforts to promote beer -- efforts that, he quickly noted, differed sharply from tobacco's.

"The tobacco industry had the attitude of an elephant hiding behind a telephone pole," he said. As an example, he cited Duke University: it was founded with tobacco money, but industry executives, fearing negative publicity, don't mention this. In contrast, Rehr said: "Our view as beer wholesalers is that we're proud of our product -- we're going to put the elephant on the street. We have to make sure we remind people that beer is an integral part of our culture."

That philosophy guided Rehr as he set about remaking the N.B.W.A. His first task was to devise a catchy slogan that summed up the work of beer wholesalers. From his time on the Hill, he knew that when meeting members, "you don't have 15 minutes to explain who you are." Batting around ideas with a friend, he eventually hit on "Family Businesses Distributing America's Beverage." The phrase evoked beer's association with baseball, picnics and the Fourth of July, and everything subsequently sent to the Hill would bear it.

Step 2 was increasing the N.B.W.A.'s visibility. An early opportunity came in January 1993. With President Clinton preparing his health-care-reform package, there was talk of financing it in part by another tax hike on alcohol, beer included. Rehr immediately sent out faxes to the association's members, urging them to call the White House and express their opposition. The phone lines were soon jammed, and the proposed increase was quickly dropped. Encouraged, Rehr set up a "blast fax" capacity at his office, enabling him to send out action alerts to N.B.W.A. members, as well as to members of Congress, when urgent issues arise.

To lend weight to those appeals, Rehr moved to expand the N.B.W.A.'s political action committee. Prior to his arrival, Six PAC, as it is informally called, was spending about $430,000 per two-year election cycle. Under Rehr's prodding, that figure quickly jumped to $1.5 million -- more than even the A.F.L.-C.I.O. could muster through its PAC. Convinced that the best way to promote the wholesalers' interests was to elect a pro-business Congress, Rehr bestowed most of that money on Republicans. He also made a point of giving to candidates in close races, thus increasing their sense of indebtedness. The N.B.W.A.'s money helped engineer the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, an event that gave the association many powerful friends in Congress.

Those friends have been eager to show their gratitude. Every spring, for instance, the association holds a legislative conference in Washington, bringing in wholesalers and brewers from around the country to lobby on key issues. For the 1997 meeting, more than 800 showed up. They were addressed by a number of congressmen, including Republican leaders as well as Dick Gephardt, who praised Anheuser-Busch and expressed support for H.R. 158, an N.B.W.A.-inspired bill to roll back the 1991 beer-tax increase.

When it was first introduced, H.R. 158 was given little chance. But the N.B.W.A. made it a top legislative priority, and at the spring conference, Rehr roused the troops with a stirring description of all the jobs and sales that the earlier hike had cost the industry. Soon after, the wholesalers descended like an angry pack on Congress, seeking out their individual representatives and urging them to support H.R. 158. It now has more than 80 co-sponsors.

In some cases, Rehr has worked hard to make sure Congress does not act. A good example occurred two years ago, after Seagram, breaking a 48-year-old voluntary ban on hard-liquor television ads, decided to begin running commercials for Crown Royal whisky and other products. With public protest flaring, subcommittees in both the House and Senate scheduled hearings on the issue. Rehr -- worried that beer's own right to advertise would be called into question -- met with several Senate staff members to express his concern. "I made the case that we have been responsible in our advertising," he said. "We didn't want the hearing to become a circus. They'd bring in all the 'neo-prohibitionists' and let them go crazy. And they'd bring in the spirits people, who would dump all over us."

George Brown, head of the Beer League and a leading state lobbyist, knows how he will fight to keep the loophole that allows 18- to 20-year-olds to enter bars in Louisiana. He handed me a list of upcoming fund-raisers for state legislators, pointing out those the league will be supporting.

With Anheuser-Busch and the Beer Institute also weighing in, the hearings were postponed several times, then dropped altogether. Owing to beer industry pressure, then, Congress passed up a major opportunity to investigate the issue of alcohol ads on television.

Rehr has made some missteps. In 1996, for instance, he suggested that the N.B.W.A. invite William Bennett to speak at its annual fall convention. "When I was working on Capitol Hill in the 80's and Bill Bennett was drug czar," Rehr recalled, "I heard him give one of the most amazing talks on the physiological addiction of crack cocaine. I thought it would be really neat to have him come talk to the beer wholesalers about how bad drugs are, and how good beer is, and how we've been responsible in fighting under-age drinking." Bennett was interested but had a scheduling conflict. In early 1997, the N.B.W.A. approached him again about speaking at that year's convention, and this time Bennett agreed to do so (for $40,000 for a 35-minute speech).

In the interim, however, Bennett had published a book, called "Body Count," on the fight against drugs and crime. While mostly about illegal drugs, the book included a 13-page section on "Liquor, Disorder, and Crime." "Make no mistake," the book asserts, "liquor is as much a part of the problem as drugs, perhaps a bigger part." The problem, "Body Count" asserts, is particularly acute in poor inner-city neighborhoods, "where liquor outlets cast their shadows everywhere." As a remedy, the book calls for measures aimed at reducing alcohol consumption, including stricter zoning codes and limits on advertising.

Bennett did not actually write the section on alcohol; one of his co-authors, John DiIulio Jr., a leading commentator on crime, did. But Bennett fully endorsed it, and when the book was brought to the wholesalers' attention, they decided to disinvite him. Bennett vented his displeasure on The New York Times Op-Ed page. "I have a reputation for being a conservative," he wrote. "And I am. But conservatives need to go where the facts, not ideology, lead. And the facts tell us that there is a very strong link between alcohol availability, consumption and crime." He added: "If the liquor industry does not start acting in a more socially responsible way, it may soon find itself held in the same kind of esteem in which the tobacco companies are now held."

Discussing the matter, Rehr did not try to conceal his own pique. "I think Bill Bennett got ticked off that he couldn't make $40,000 for a 35-minute speech, so he decided to lash out at the beer people," he said. "I don't want to pick a fight with the drug czar, because he does have a lot of followers and a lot of influence. But I think it's very shortsighted of him to attack an industry that helps elect and re-elect people who work with him on a lot of issues." Overall, the incident highlighted the tensions between the generally conservative beer industry and Republicans concerned with alcohol's corrosive effects on the commonweal.

Rehr has done his best to make sure those tensions remain dormant. From time to time, for instance, he attends the regular Wednesday meetings of conservative activists held at the offices of Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and a well-known Republican networker. Represented are some 60 groups, including the National Rifle Association, the National Right to Life Committee, the Gun Owners of America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council (run by the former Reagan aide Gary Bauer). Despite their varied agendas, these groups share an interest in keeping Congress antigovernment, pro-business and staunchly Republican, and the meetings provide an opportunity to coordinate strategies.

For Rehr, they also provide a chance to work with groups that might otherwise cause him trouble. The Christian Coalition, for example, might be expected to support such measures as sin taxes on alcohol. In 1996, however, Rehr shrewdly enlisted it in lobbying for a bill that would keep nonprofit organizations from using Federal funds to lobby Congress, a cherished goal of the coalition. "When beer wholesalers think of working with the Christian Coalition, they get a little nervous," Rehr said with a smile. "'Hey, they're the bad guys,' people say." As a result of his work, though, the beer wholesalers have effectively neutralized the coalition on alcohol issues.

More generally, the wholesalers, through the deft deployment of money and contacts, have helped head off any moves in Congress to address the public-health consequences of their product -- something Big Tobacco failed to do.

For most of the last 15 years, George Hacker has run the alcohol-policies project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and perhaps more than anyone in Washington, he understands how good Big Alcohol is at what it does. Courteous and soft-spoken, with gray-flecked dark hair, small-frame glasses and a slight build, Hacker in person seems unassuming, but he is the undisputed general of the nation's alcohol-control forces. As Hacker hastens to assert, he is no Carrie Nation; last year, he ordered a case of Champagne to celebrate his 50th birthday. He does, however, believe that alcohol is too readily available at too low a price, and at his office near Dupont Circle he is forever working to change that.

"Like tobacco, alcohol imposes enormous costs on society," Hacker said. "The question is, Is the industry doing enough to reduce these costs or to compensate society for them?" Big Alcohol, he added, "likes to look just at the individual. That's the point of its messages to 'drink responsibly' and 'know when to say when.' But it's not simply a matter of individual responsibility. Because this is an addictive substance. And because it can be purchased 24 hours a day and is sold in colorfully packaged containers that appeal to kids. These are the kinds of things that we're trying to target, much as in the tobacco debate."

Yet as Hacker is the first to admit, alcohol is a far more formidable adversary than tobacco. "Alcohol has been a lot smarter than tobacco," he grudgingly noted. "It's been forced to because of the experience of Prohibition. The industry knows what can happen if it's not careful."

Hacker's struggles are compounded by his lack of resources. He has a staff of just seven and a budget of $500,000. He cannot afford to take anyone to lunch. And his organization has no political action committee to make contributions to members of Congress. As a result, he is constantly being outmaneuvered by the industry. "Everything takes place behind closed doors," he lamented. "Nobody wants to get up there and defend the alcohol industry, or its advertising." Hacker is particularly disappointed in the Clinton Administration, which he believes has an even worse record on the issue than the Bush Administration. Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has met with both the Distilled Spirits Council and the Wine Institute but has turned down requests to meet with public-health advocates on alcohol.

Even religious organizations have shunned Hacker. "We've tried to recruit the Christian Coalition -- for instance, on the liquor-advertising matter," he complained. "It would seem a natural for them. I've talked to their lobbyist. But they've been playing worse than hard to get."

MADD has been no less frustrated. Founded in 1980, Mothers Against Drunk Driving is today among the most respected grass-roots organizations in the country. It is also among the largest, with tens of thousands of volunteers working through 600 chapters and community action teams to combat drunk driving and other forms of alcohol abuse. Based in Irving, Tex., MADD has no office in Washington, making do there with a single part-time lobbyist. "We're not a bunch of politicians or high-priced lawyers," said Katherine Prescott, who recently ended a two-year term as president. "We don't have the money to invest in lobbyists and PAC's."

As president, Prescott, who joined MADD after her 16-year-old son was killed by a drunken driver, set as her top goal lowering the nation's legal definition of intoxication to a blood-alcohol-content level of 0.08. The National Highway Safety Administration has determined that a typical 170-pound man has to consume more than four drinks on an empty stomach in one hour to exceed 0.08. At that level, its studies have found, most drivers are significantly impaired. Yet 33 states have set their blood-alcohol limit at 0.1.

In early 1997, bills were introduced in the House and Senate to cut Federal highway funds to states that failed to adopt the 0.08 standard. To help line up co-sponsors, Prescott began making trips to Washington from her home in Greenville, N.C. At every turn, however, she encountered Rick Berman, the general counsel of the American Beverage Institute. The institute represents some of the nation's largest restaurant chains, including Thank God It's Friday, Ruth's Chris Steakhouse and Hooters, and it works closely with the alcohol industry. Fearing the effect 0.08 might have on their businesses, the institute directed Berman to fight the legislation. A tall, balding, energetic lawyer, Berman began writing op-ed pieces, meeting with journalists and appearing at hearings. If 0.08 were adopted, he warned, in what became a kind of rallying cry, a 120-pound woman having two six-ounce glasses of wine over a two-hour period would be subject to arrest and imprisonment.

Prescott bridles at such talk. The American Beverage Institute "has made this issue its life's work, saying we're trying to keep people from social drinking," she said. "Frankly, I don't care how many drinks a guy has -- two, three, four or whatever -- if 0.08 is the level most people are impaired at, that should be the legal limit."

MADD received a big boost earlier this month when President Clinton announced his support for 0.08, the adoption of which would save more than 500 lives a year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. A few days after the President's announcement, the Senate voted to adopt 0.08, but a tough fight is expected in the House, where Berman is concentrating his energies, and where David Rehr and the beer wholesalers are mobilizing their many friends against the bill.

But in the field, away from the capital, things don't look all that different. It is true that at the grass roots, the nation's alcohol-control forces have been most aggressive, and have finally fought their way into the corridors of power. But progress has been slow and difficult.

Louisiana's experience is in many ways the most telling. Just a few years ago, members of the MADD chapter in Baton Rouge could barely get a hearing in the Legislature. Linda Hull, a volunteer, still gets worked up when she recalls what it was like. A Louisiana native with short blond hair, large eyes and a friendly manner, Hull joined MADD in 1991. Four years earlier, her eldest daughter, a student at the University of Texas, was killed when a drunken 18-year-old plowed head-on into her car. Five months later, Hull's 17-year-old stepdaughter was being driven home by her date; drunk, he ran a stop sign, and the car was hit broadside, killing the girl. Then, in 1991, Hull's youngest daughter, a junior-college student, was walking out of a Louisiana dance hall when a drunk driver lost control and hit her; she, too, was killed.

Seeking an outlet for her grief, Hull joined MADD. In 1993, she made her first appearance before a legislative committee. The issue was Louisiana's drinking-age law. At the time, the law prohibited those under 21 from buying alcohol but allowed bars to serve them -- a surreal concession to the industry that effectively gutted the law. Intent on dramatizing the toll this had taken, Hull expected an attentive audience. Instead, while she testified, the legislators chatted with one another and walked in and out of the room. Later, in the lobby, a state senator approached her and asked her to go to a party with him. "I couldn't believe this guy was coming on to me," she recalled.

By contrast, when it was George Brown's turn to testify, the senators listened raptly and called him by his first name. Back then, any measure seeking to toughen the state's drinking laws could never even make it out of committee. In a reflection, perhaps, of the nature of Louisiana politics, the commissioner of the alcohol control board was a good friend of Brown's.

Then, in 1992, Richard Leyoub was elected the state's attorney general. An activist Democrat, Leyoub wanted to tackle the problem of substance abuse in Louisiana. To get a sense of its scope, he began holding hearings around the state. "When the students were asked what the biggest problem was in their schools in terms of substance abuse, I expected them to say marijuana, or crack cocaine, but in every area in the state, metropolitan as well as rural, the answer was alcohol," recalled Ieyoub, a stocky, forceful man whose office in the Capitol building is crammed with mementos of Napoleon, Churchill and other heroes.

Ieyoub's first priority was getting rid of the provision that allowed bars to serve those under 21. To push for change, Ieyoub formed a coalition of police officials, treatment providers, community activists and religious groups. "Legislators began to get calls from their constituents," he recalled. "They began to sense a shift in people's attitudes toward alcohol."

Finally, in 1995, the Legislature voted to make it illegal for bar owners to serve those under 21. The industry challenged the new law in court, but it was eventually upheld. At long last, Louisiana had joined the rest of the nation in adopting the 21-year-old standard. A problem remained, however. While the new law made it illegal for 18- to 20-year-olds to drink in bars, it did not prohibit them from entering bars -- a loophole that made the law unenforceable in most cases.

Once more, the alcohol-control forces went to work. This time, they would have an important new ally. Dr. Richard Scribner was a preventive-medicine specialist at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. In the early 1990's, Scribner became interested in the link between alcohol availability and crime, and a study he did in Los Angeles County revealed that the rates of violent crime were measurably higher in areas that had more liquor outlets, even when such factors as unemployment, income level and racial composition were taken into account.

Scribner's work came to the attention of Dr. Deborah Cohen of the Louisiana State University Medical School in New Orleans. Contacting him, Cohen argued that if he really wanted to study outlet density, he should come to New Orleans. Scribner, who was living on a farm north of Los Angeles with his wife, four sons and five goats, was reluctant, but Cohen eventually made him an offer he could not refuse, and so in late 1994 he became an assistant professor at the L.S.U. Medical School.

He was not quite prepared for the Big Easy. "I thought, 'Wow, this place is different,"' said the 43-year-old Scribner, a tall, balding, ebullient man. "It was a shock to see people getting out of cars drinking. There were people walking through malls drinking. Even the doughnut shops served alcohol."

As in Los Angeles, Scribner went about mapping the city. In the end, he found that census tracts with two liquor outlets had an average of two homicides every four years, compared with one homicide in tracts with just one outlet.

Once his findings were in, Scribner began sharing them with police officials and inner-city church ministers. City council members were so impressed with his maps that they prepared new ordinances aimed at making it easier to crack down on problem outlets. Scribner also met with representatives of MADD and other grass-roots groups, providing scholarly evidence for the positions they had instinctively taken.

Meanwhile, a series of financial scandals was weeding out some of George Brown's friends in the State Legislature. And Edwin Edwards, the freewheeling Governor, was replaced by Mike Foster. A Republican businessman with close ties to the state's oil and gas industries, Foster would seem an unlikely ally for the alcohol-control movement. But as a state senator he had shown reformist tendencies, and soon after becoming Governor he appointed a new, more independent head of the alcohol-control board. He also attended a MADD news conference. "From that moment on, people talked with us," said Cathy Morgan Childers, the director of victim services at MADD's Baton Rouge office. "It gave us a lot of validation." At MADD's suggestion, the Governor set up a task force to explore ways of getting the state's drunk drivers off the roads.

Then, in late August, Benjamin Wynne of L.S.U. died from alcohol intoxication. Amid the ensuing outcry, Scribner took his mapping techniques to Baton Rouge. Within a half-mile of the L.S.U. campus, he found, there were 50 alcohol outlets -- 16 on one block. "This is a density equivalent to what you would find in the heart of the French Quarter," Scribner wrote in a blistering column in The New Orleans Times-Picayune. The alcohol industry was not pleased. With his maps, Scribner was stirring up the populace. "He's definitely had an effect on the political process," observed Chris Young, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Alcoholic Beverage Licensees, a group of alcohol retailers.

A tall, burly 35-year-old lawyer given to speaking his mind, Young is being groomed to take George Brown's place as head of the Beer Industry League when he retires. Speaking in the Rivershack Tavern, a charmingly ramshackle bar on the banks of the Mississippi River, Young described his efforts to make bars more responsible through server-training programs, in which bartenders are taught to recognize minors and those drinking too much. In the end, though, he said, the best way to prevent abuse among the young would be to lower the drinking age to 19. That way, he said, teen-agers would do their drinking in bars and other controlled environments, rather than in private apartments and frat houses, where, he said, abuse was more likely.

Young became most animated when Scribner's name came up. "He's so far out there," he said with a scowl. Questioning Scribner's reasons for coming to New Orleans, he said: "All of a sudden he appeared here, talking about raising taxes and the like. I believe he was imported to the state of Louisiana to attack the alcohol beverage industry." Scribner's research, he added, "needs to be discredited."

Young made an effort to do that at the Dec. 3 meeting of the Governor's task force on drunk driving. Scribner, he said, had "spent thousands of dollars on three studies, funded by who knows who, and he drew certain conclusions, and uses them against certain entities, but we're saying there's strong evidence that he doesn't know what he's talking about." Ending with a flourish, he said, "I am addressing the credibility and competence of Dr. Scribner." In the end, however, the task force sided with Scribner, voting overwhelmingly to recommend that the Governor introduce legislation in 1998 to close the loophole.

This week, the Louisiana legislature is to begin a special session devoted to fiscal matters. The Governor, though, can introduce a few nonfiscal bills of pressing importance. With the memory of Benjamin Wynne still fresh, and his own task force taking such a strong stand, alcohol-control advocates regarded it as foregone that Governor Foster would include the loophole-closing bill in his package. Yet more than two months after the task force's vote, he had yet to make a decision. "We, like any other state -- and probably more so, because of the culture here -- have problems with alcohol," Foster explained in an interview. "But I've got some major things I need to get done, and since it's a short session, we want to keep controversial things out."

On March 12, Foster did finally decide to go ahead and introduce the bill. Its prospects in the Legislature remain uncertain, however, and even if the measure does carry, the alcohol-control movement has no other item on its agenda, like tax hikes or advertising restrictions, that would further challenge the industry. For all the new activism in Louisiana, the liquor lobby there remains firmly in command.

The same is generally true elsewhere. The new push by community groups has been met by an equally vigorous counterpush by the industry. And in terms of money, influence and connections, the public-health forces simply can't compete. From Baton Rouge to Washington, Big Alcohol seems unassailable.

Of course, that's what was once said of Big Tobacco. As recently as five years ago, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds and the rest of that industry seemed politically invincible. Then came a series of unforeseen developments -- the leak of sensitive documents, the emergence of a whistle-blower, the public relations debacle of tobacco executives testifying under oath in Congress and, finally, the election of a President ready to take on the industry -- and the walls that Big Tobacco had so carefully erected came tumbling down. Big Alcohol, having so intently studied tobacco's fortunes, knows that it could suffer the same fate. Industry executives, in fact, live in constant dread that some event -- a celebrity killed by a drunken driver, say -- will ignite a blaze of public indignation that they will not be able to put out.

But David Rehr, George Brown and all the rest are working hard to make sure that their business does not go up in smoke.