Word: alcoholic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Aside from the possibility that alcohol encourages expressions of love and sympathy and other Christian virtues, there are no very good moral arguments for drinking at a slightly earlier age. On the other hand, drinking is no more immoral at eighteen than at twenty-one. And there is little reason to believe that eighteen year-olds would have less self-control than a (hypothetical) inexperienced man of twenty-one. It seems strange that eighteen year-olds who drink without any observable harm in New York should acquire a more delicate constitution in Massachusetts...
...passion is visible on the unwrinkled, calm faces of Americans--the simple food, the lack of fresh meat, which is too expensive for every-day fare, the meals taken at odd moments and carelessly served, form the slim and often beautiful bodies, the naive faces, and the empty glances. Alcohol, strictly speaking, could remedy this situation. And it is true that after six o'clock in the evening, at parties and in bars, cocktails, whiskies, and gin-and-tonics--which, everyone knows, has a quinine base--plunge three quarters of the population into a euphoria which gives to young people...
South Africa's bootleg native drink, skokiaan (subject of a recent U.S. hit tune), is usually mixed by "skokiaan queens" who know how to spike it with enough methyl alcohol to provide the jolt that thrills but does not kill. The balance is so easily upset that natives often go mad or blind from the skokiaan they buy in the shebeens of the native quarters...
...natives who came upon a deserted railway tank car near Durban last week recognized the lettering "alcohol" on the car, but the prefix "methyl" meant nothing to them. Agog with the prospect of a gay weekend, they drained off 22 gallons of methyl alcohol still in the bottom of the tank and carried it off in a big black drum to be mixed into home brew. But first they decided to have a quick taste all around...
...hours later nine of them were dead, and 55 were writhing in pain in hospitals. Next morning 27 more did not show up for work, and police began searching empty lots and alleys for their bodies. The drum of methyl alcohol was found nearly empty, its contents presumably circulating among other unsuspecting drinkers. Police cruised the native quarters with loudspeakers, warning: "Don't drink this weekend. Don't drink this weekend...