ABSTRACT
There can be few acts of human behaviour that are so emotive, so coloured by value judgement, and so tinged with pseudo-scientific beliefs as those which involve drug taking. Over the centuries people’s need to alter their perception of the world using psychoactive substances has been variously encouraged, condoned, manipulated and condemned. Society’s attitudes to alcohol use remain as inconsistent and ambivalent now as ever. Dependence, having been made a fact, is defined as a clustering of phenomena - such things as salience, compulsion to drink, reinstatement after abstinence and so forth. Most societies are not absolutist and the cursor ‘cuts’ the curve at some point, thus producing some dichotomy between normal and abnormal drinkers. People whose drinking behaviour is unacceptable have no doubt been with them for as long as alcohol has been with them. The process through which alcohol dependence syndrome has gone seems to be akin to saying that ‘urbafanity’ consists of Birmingham, Glasgow, Leicester and Manchester.
