by Dwight B. Heath

About the author: Dwight B. Heath is a professor of anthropology at Brown University and the author of Drinking Occasions: Comparative Perspectives on Alcohol and Culture.

Early in 2000 the American print media amply reported another in a long trail of negative announcements regarding alcoholic-beverage consumption. The press release that had triggered this wave of alcohol reportage, with its somber extrapolations, had grown out of a research project sponsored by the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). This study, published in the Journal of Substance Abuse, had concerned the correlation of (1) age of first beverage alcohol intake and (2) alcoholism. Its principal finding was, in simple terms, that subjects who had first imbibed at an early age were, to a statistically significant degree, likelier eventually to become alcoholics than...