X Researchers have derived important lessons from cross-cultural research on drinking practices.

"[The following are] some of the most significant generalizations that derive from cross-cultural study of the subject:

1. In most societies, drinking is essentially a social act and as such, it is embedded in a context of values, attitudes, and other norms.
2. These values, attitudes, and other norms constitute important sociocultural factors that influence the effects of drinking, regardless of how important biochemical, physiological, and pharmacokinetic factors may also be in that respect.
3. The drinking of alcoholic beverages tends to be hedged about with rules concerning who may and may not drink how much of what, in what contexts, in the company of whom, and so forth. Often such rules are the focus of exceptionally strong emotions and sanctions.
4. The value of alcohol for promoting relaxation and sociability is emphasized in many populations.
5. The association of drinking with any kind of specifically associated problems -- physical, economic, psychological, social relational, or other -- is rare among cultures throughout both history and the contemporary world.
6. When alcohol-related problems do occur, they are clearly linked with modalities of drinking, and usually also with values, attitudes, and norms about drinking.
7. Attempts at prohibition have never been successful except when couched in terms of sacred or supernatural rules."

Heath, D.B., "Drinking and Drunkenness in Transcultural Perspective: Part II," Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review, 1986, Vol. 23, 103-126 (quote p. 121).

1. Beverage alcohol usually is not a problem in society unless and until it is defined as such.
2. When members of a society have had sufficient time to develop a widely shared set of beliefs and values pertaining to drinking and drunkenness, the consequences of alcohol consumption are not usually disruptive for most persons in that society. On the other hand, where beverage alcohol has been introduced within the past century and such a set of beliefs and values has not developed completely, social -- and sometimes physiological -- problems with ethanol commonly result.
3. Socially disruptive drinking occurs only in secular settings.
4. Where opportunities for group or community recreation are few and alcoholic beverages are available, alcohol consumption will become a major form of recreational activity in a community ("the boredom rule").
5. Typically, alcoholic beverages are used more by males than by females and more by young adults than by preadolescents or older persons. Hence in any society the major consumers of beverage alcohol are most likely to be young men between their mid-teens and their mid-thirties.
6. The drinking of alcoholic beverages occurs usually with friends or relatives and not among strangers. Where drinking among strangers does take place, violence is much more likely to erupt.
7. Peoples who lacked alcoholic beverages aboriginally borrowed styles of drunken comportment along with the beverages from those who introduced them to "demon rum."
8. When alcoholic beverages are defined culturally as a food and/or a medicine, drunkenness seldom is disruptive or antisocial.
9. Alcoholic beverages are the drug of choice for a majority of persons in any society, even if alternative drug substances are available.

Selected points from Marshall, M., "Conclusions," pp. 451-457 in Marshall, M., ed., Beliefs, Behaviors, & Alcoholic Beverages: A Cross-Cultural Survey, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 1979.