Stanton wrote a chapter analyzing different views on alcohol, whether as good or evil, and how these views impact drinking practices. In the U.S., public health authorities and educators continuously broadcast negative information about alcohol, while young people and others continue to drink excessively and dangerously. An alternate model is to encompass beverage alcohol in an overall positive and healthy lifestyle, in which alcohol is assigned a limited but constructive role. Positive drinking cultures also hold people responsible for their drinking behavior and are intolerant of disruptive drinking.

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In: S. Peele & M. Grant (Eds.) (1999), Alcohol and pleasure: A health perspective, Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel, pp. 1-7
© Copyright 1999 Stanton Peele. All rights reserved.

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Historically and internationally, cultural visions of alcohol and its effects vary in terms of how positive or negative they are and the likely consequences that they attach to alcohol consumption. The dominant contemporary vision of alcohol in the United States is that alcohol (a) is primarily negative and has exclusively hazardous consequences, (b) leads frequently to uncontrollable behavior, and (c) is something that young people should be warned against. The consequences of this vision are that when children do drink (which teenagers regularly do), they know of no alternative but excessive, intense consumption patterns, leading them frequently to drink to intoxication. This chapter explores alternative models of drinking and channels for conveying them which emphasize healthy versus unhealthy consumption patterns as well as the individual's responsibility to manage his or her drinking. The ultimate goal is for people to see alcohol as an accompaniment to an overall healthy and pleasurable lifestyle, an image they enact as moderate, sensible drinking patterns.

Models of Alcohol's Effects

Selden Bacon, a founder and long-time director of the Yale (then Rutgers) Center of Alcohol Studies, remarked on the strange public health approach to alcohol taken in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world:

Current organized knowledge about alcohol use can be likened to... knowledge about automobiles and their use if the latter were limited to facts and theories about accidents and crashes.... [What is missing are] the positive functions and positive attitudes about alcohol uses in our as well as in other societies.... If educating youth about drinking starts from the assumed basis that such drinking is bad... full of risk for life and property, at best considered as an escape, clearly useless per se, and/or frequently the precursor of disease, and the subject matter is taught by nondrinkers and antidrinkers, this is a particular indoctrination. Further, if 75-80% of the surrounding peers and elders are or are going to become drinkers, there [is]... an inconsistency between the message and the reality. (Bacon, 1984, pp. 22-24)

When Bacon wrote these words, the coronary and mortality benefits of alcohol were only beginning to be established, while the psychological and social benefits of drinking had not been systematically assessed. His wry observations seem doubly relevant today, now that the life-prolonging effects of alcohol are on a firm footing (Doll, 1997; Klatsky, 1999) and the conference on which this volume is based has begun the discussion of the ways in which alcohol enhances quality of life (see also Baum-Baicker, 1985; Brodsky & Peele, 1999; Peele & Brodsky, 1998). In other words, if science indicates that alcohol conveys significant life advantages, why does alcohol policy act as though alcohol were evil?

This chapter examines different views of alcohol as being either evil or good (Table 26.1). Two different typologies of social attitudes towards alcohol are employed. One is the distinction between temperance and nontemperance Western societies. In the former, major efforts have been mounted to ban alcoholic beverages (Levine, 1992). Less alcohol is consumed in temperance societies, with more outward signs of problematic use. In nontemperance societies, by contrast, alcohol is used almost universally, drinking is socially integrated, and few behavioral and other alcohol-related problems are noted (Peele, 1997).

An alternate typology has been used by sociologists to characterize norms and attitudes towards alcohol in subgroups within the larger society. Akers (1992) lists four such types of groups: (a) groups with proscriptive norms against the use of alcohol; (b) prescriptive groups that accept and welcome drinking but establish clear norms for its consumption; (c) groups with ambivalent norms that invite drinking but also fear and resent it; and (d) groups with permissive norms that not only tolerate and invite drinking but do not set limits on consumption or on behavior while drinking.

This chapter contrasts these different views of alcohol and the ways of approaching alcohol education and policy suggested by each. It additionally juxtaposes the potential consequences of each view and its educational approach.