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ALCOHOL PROBLEMS: AS SIN OR MORAL FAILING

Societies have come to grips with alcohol problems in a variety of ways. One of these regards drunkenness as a sin, a moral failing, and the drunk as a moral weakling of some kind. The Greek word for drunk, for example, means literally to "misbehave at the wine." An Egyptian writer admonished his friend with the slightly contemptuous "thou art like a little child." Noah, who undoubtedly had reason to seek relief in drunkenness after getting all those creatures safely through the flood, was not looked on kindly by his children as he lay in his drunken stupor. The complaints have continued through time. A Dutch physician of the sixteenth century criticized the heavy use of alcohol in Germany and Flanders by saying "that freelier than is profitable to health, they take it and drink it." Some of the most forceful sanctions have come from the temperance movements. An early temperance leader wrote that "alcohol is preeminently a destroyer in every department of life." As late as March 1974, the New Hampshire Christian Civic League devoted an entire issue of its monthly newspaper to a polemic against the idea that alcoholism is a disease. In its view the disease concept gives reprieve to the "odious alcohol sinner."

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