For this assignment, you will: • Read the section from your textbook. • Think ab

For this assignment, you will:
• Read the section from your textbook.
• Think about the main ideas contained in the section.
• In your own words, write a summarization on the history of alcohol in America and its
influences on our society today.
• Discuss whether or not you agree with current laws and regulations surrounding alcohol use.
If you were in charge of implementing regulations around alcohol use, what recommendations
would you make? What are some ethical considerations regarding the recommendations you
are making? Consider how alcohol use impacts individual users as well as others (e.g.
children, unborn children, other drivers). Explain your point of view.
• Find a current events article related to alcohol regulation or the impact of alcohol use.
Summarize the main points of the article and discuss the implications for individuals and/or
society.
• Be sure to include a link to the article.
Textbook Section:
Review the information from the textbook titled – Alcohol Use and “The Alcohol Problem.”
Requirements:
• Incorporate all ideas into your own words.
• Use appropriate APA placement and style for in-text citations and the reference.
• Complete your work in a Microsoft Word document.
This is the section from the textbook:
Alcohol Use and “The Alcohol Problem”
Historians seem to agree that, at the time of America’s revolution against the English in the late 1700s, most Americans drank alcoholic beverages and most people favored these beverages compared with drinking water, which was often contaminated. The per-capita consumption of alcohol was apparently much greater than current levels, and little public concern was expressed. Even the early Puritan ministers, who were moralistic about all kinds of behavior, referred to alcoholic drink as “the Good Creature of God.” They denounced drunkenness as a sinful misuse of the “Good Creature” but clearly placed the blame on the sinner, not on alcohol itself.1
A new view of alcohol as the cause of serious problems began to emerge in America soon after the Revolution. That view took root and still exists as a major influence in American culture today. It is so pervasive that some people have a hard time understanding what is meant by the “demonization” of alcohol (viewing alcohol as a demon, or devil). The concept is important, partly because alcohol was the first psychoactive substance to become demonized in American culture, leading the way for similar views of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana in this century. We are referring to a tendency to view a substance as an active (sometimes almost purposeful) source of evil, damaging everything it touches. Whenever harmful consequences result from the use of something (firearms and nuclear energy are other possible examples), some people find it easiest to simply view that thing as “bad” and seek to eliminate it.
The Temperance Movement in America
The first writings indicating a negative view of alcohol itself are attributed to a prominent Philadelphia physician named Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Rush’s 1784 pamphlet, “An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits on the Mind and Body,” was aimed particularly at distilled spirits (ardent means “burning,” “fiery”), not at the weaker beverages, such as beer and wine. As a physician, Rush had noticed a relationship between heavy drinking and jaundice (an indicator of liver disease), “madness” (perhaps the delirium tremens of withdrawal, or perhaps what we now call Korsakoff’s psychosis), and “epilepsy” (probably the seizures seen during withdrawal). All of those are currently accepted and
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well-documented consequences of heavy alcohol use. However, Rush also concluded that hard liquor damaged the drinker’s morality, leading to a variety of antisocial, immoral, and criminal behaviors. Rush believed that this was a direct toxic action of distilled spirits on the part of the brain responsible for morality. Rush then introduced for the first time the concept of “addiction” to a psychoactive substance, describing the uncontrollable and overwhelming desires for alcohol experienced by some of his patients. For the first time this condition was referred to as a disease (caused by alcohol), and he recommended total abstinence from alcohol for those who were problem drinkers.1
Other physicians readily recognized these symptoms in their own patients, and physicians became the first leaders of the temperance movement. What Rush proposed, and most early followers supported, was that everyone should avoid distilled spirits entirely, because they were considered to be toxic, and should consume beer and wine in a temperate, or moderate, manner. Temperance societies were formed in many parts of the country, at first among the upper classes of physicians, ministers, and businesspeople. In the early 1800s, it became fashionable for the middle classes to join the elite in this movement, and hundreds of thousands of American businesspeople, farmers, lawyers, teachers, and their families “took the pledge” to avoid spirits and to be temperate in their use of beer or wine.
the textbook is called Drugs, Society and Human Behavior 17 edition.