ABSTRACT
Over the centuries, the use of alcohol by the human race has been variously encouraged, condemned, manipulated, and prohibited and has led to great enjoyment and profit as well as misery and ruin. Society’s response to alcohol is as ambivalent as ever and can be seen as a continuum on which punishment and prohibition lie at one end, treatment and rehabilitation near the middle, and education and training, often seen as the soft option, at the opposite end. The history of alcohol use presents a tangled web and it is worthwhile teasing out its various threads to set it in context, to learn lessons from the past, and to make informed predictions about the future. Religious disapproval apart alcohol is now ‘the chosen intoxicant of European peoples as it has been in many other parts of the world. Focusing on the pharmacological properties of alcohol, the biological model of alcohol dependence highlights biochemical, physiological, and neurophysiological abnormalities.
