• Treatment is crucial, yet funds slow to a trickle
• A family's love changes one woman's life
• Alternative program employs practicality
• Kittery leads way in prevention by giving youths a place to go
• Problem escalates among women; elderly learn to reach out for help
• 1997 deaths related to alcohol
• Team of reporters, editors, photographer produced series
• Series summary: Maine pays dearly as families are ruined by alcohol abuse

Are you concerned that you've been drinking a little too much lately?

Maybe all those afternoons of drinking beer with your golf buddies have started to cause tension between you and your wife.

Maybe you're a college student who parties so much on the weekends it's beginning to affect your relationships and interfere with your studies.

Or maybe you've just gotten a wake-up call in the form of your first OUI.

Many people in these uncomfortable situations don't seek help because they fear they will be labeled an alcoholic and forced into AA. But there is something else you can do to keep your problem drinking from escalating into a full-blown alcohol dependency and big-time trouble.

It's called ''low-risk drinking.''

Low-risk drinking is a method being used by an increasing number of alcohol counselors to help people cut back on their alcohol intake. Low-risk drinkers set specific limits on how much they're going to drink each week and stick to them. And they don't drink every day.

People in the United States tend to think of alcoholism like pregnancy - you either have it or you don't, says Dr. Bill Clark of the Addiction Resource Center in Bath. But other countries recognize that there are different levels of drinking problems, and that alcohol counselors need to be able to offer something other than abstinence to people whose problems aren't as serious.

''For people who are on their way into alcoholism, there's a transition period where they begin to drink in an unhealthy way,'' Clark explains, ''and there's no specific reason why a person who's tipped the balance a little bit towards getting into trouble shouldn't be able to tip the balance back again.''

Good candidates for low-risk drinking tend to be people in their 20s who don't have long histories of drinking problems. And they don't have serious psychiatric problems like depression.

''Low-risk drinking really teaches people about the decisions they have to make about drinking, and how to make responsible decisions,'' says Pat Conner, a therapist who works with Clark and has a private practice in Brunswick.

Clark and Conner use drinking guidelines developed by the Alcohol Risk Assessment and Intervention Project, a project of the College of Family Physicians in Canada. The guidelines are the results of 18 years of research with hundreds of drinkers.

For men, generally the limits are no more than four drinks on any particular day; for women, no more than three a day. Men and women are allowed a total of no more than 12 drinks a week, and there must be at least two to three days of abstinence each week.

These are maximum guidelines, Conner points out; it's better to drink less.

''There's obviously dilemmas because a lot of guys, particularly young guys, come in and they want their limit to be a six-pack,'' Conner says. ''Well, sorry, that's outside the limit. It's non-negotiable over the limits.''

Low-risk drinkers also use a workbook that helps them record their drinking patterns and figure out what events and feelings trigger their drinking. It also gives tips on cutting back. To avoid becoming drunk, for example, the workbook suggests things like waiting an hour between drinks, or alternating alcoholic drinks with nonalcoholic ones.

''I always, always stress that the only way to guarantee that you won't have any more problems with alcohol is abstinence,'' Conner says. ''And we also make the distinction that no amount of alcohol and driving is appropriate.''

Low-risk drinking can be dangerous for people who have already developed a chemical dependency. Anyone who is interested in trying it should see a doctor or counselor first.

But there's a huge number of people who can benefit from this method. Alcoholics account for only a fraction of the number of problem drinkers in this country, Clark notes. The others - college students who binge drink, for example - are responsible for many of the societal troubles that come along with alcohol abuse, yet they fall through the cracks of the treatment system.

These people often find that at some point they are ready to cut down on their drinking, but because there are no alternatives to abstinence they wait until they're really sick before seeking help. By then, it's too late and they can't stick to limits.

''It's very clear that there are many more people who need a little help and advice who don't come through the door'' of treatment centers, Clark says. ''And it's probably because they know that all we're going to tell them is 'Sober up, go to AA' and tell them to confront their denial and stuff like that.''