Position Paper on Drinking Alcohol in the Dormitories essays

Position Paper on Drinking Alcohol in the Dormitories essays Throughout history, humans have recognized alcohol as a good and positive force in their lives; only within the last two centuries have certain prohibitionist elements in America and Northern Europe sought to vilify this ancient drink and encourage the public to consider it as a poisonous and socially treacherous substance with which one must either abstain totally or become uncontrollably addicted. It is the position of this paper that this all or nothing approach does far more harm than good, and that the best approach to alcohol is not to prohibit it but to encourage its integration into a responsible and healthy lifestyle. For this reason, I believe that the US Air Force should not require total abstinence (from alcohol) in the dormitories but should rather work to educate young airmen on the appropriate and social responsive use of Alcohol can indeed be a negative and socially disruptive force if people engage in problem drinking activities. Alcoholism is disruptive, there is no doubt of that. The idea behind prohibition of alcohol in the dorm is that limiting alcohol intake will limit the number of problems arising from alcohol abuse. However, sociologically speaking this is not an expectation based in fact. According to the International Handbook on Alcohol and Culture, "efforts at increasing controls [on alcohol] are explicitly rationalized and recommended on the premise that alcohol-related problems occur in proportion to per capita consumption, a theory that we have disproved at least in France, Italy, Spain, Iceland, and Sweden, as well as in several ethnographic studies elsewhere." (Heath, 341-342) Of course, that cultural study is to some degree comparing apples and oranges, because the less-controlled areas in this study coincide with areas with a higher social appreciation of responsible drinking. According to a cultural case study in Drugs I: Society ...