This article examines the development of alcohol health education in Britain during the 1970s, using this as a way to explore the nature of public health and the place of the public within it. Focusing on a set of local health education campaigns, an expert committee report on alcohol prevention and a public consultation exercise on alcohol, the article highlights the presence of three different 'publics'. Health education campaigns tended to focus on the individual drinker, but the drinking habits of the whole population were also of concern. So too were the rights and responsibilities of citizen-consumers. These three publics - drinkers, the population and citizen-consumers - were often in conflict with one another, and though it was drinkers that became the object of alcohol policy, the needs of the population, and of citizen-consumers, could not be ignored.