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Wonderland nature of addiction and criminal law in the United States is the fact that alcohol—
the most
destructive of all addictive drugs in terms of the consequences to the individual and society—is legal, heavily marketed and commercialized, and even glamorized in popular culture.
    3.Alcohol Is Different from Other Drugs Because It’s Easier to Control and You’re Less Likely to Become Addicted to It
    Because of our particular culture, we are less harsh on alcoholics than we are on people addicted to other drugs. When we think of heroin addicts, for example, our mental image is
not
one of a charming and upstanding citizen. We think of them as evil,scandalous thieves and criminals. Most people don’t know that heroin was once considered a “wonder drug”; it was 100 percent legal and available over the counter.
    When heroin was first introduced by Bayer (the same company that gave us aspirin), tuberculosis and pneumonia were the leading causes of death, and even routine coughs and colds could be severely incapacitating. Heroin, which both depresses respiration and gives a restorative night’s sleep as a sedative, seemed a godsend. It was used in the treatment of asthma, bronchitis, and tuberculosis and even in the treatment of alcoholism.
    According to an article in the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
in 1900, “It [heroin] possesses many advantages over morphine. It’s not hypnotic, and there’s no danger of acquiring a habit.” Heroin was widely used in America, and most medicines used by women for relief of menstrual pain contained heroin. Cocaine, a stimulant and anesthetic, was also legal; it was often used in combination with heroin in various medications, often in an alcohol base.
    Both heroin and cocaine were inexpensive until they became illegal. Suddenly, the price went sky high, and those already addicted had no choice but to get the money by any means necessary and give that money to criminals.
    Alcohol, of course, has long been associated with compulsive, uncontrolled behavior among a certain percentage of the population. The term
alcoholism
was first used in Sweden in 1849, but the first chronicles of uncontrollable urges to drink appear in the early 1800s under the term
dipsomania
. That word actually means compulsive thirst, but it soon became used specifically to mean the compulsive, uncontrolled intake of alcohol.
    The classic description of dipsomania was written by Valentin Magnan in 1893, and you will see that he did a very good job of describing what today we call alcoholism:
    Preceded by a vague feeling of malaise . . . dipsomania is a sudden need to drink that is irresistible, despite a short and intense struggle. The crisis lasts from one day to two weeks and consists of a rapid and massive ingestion of alcohol or whatever other strong, excitatory liquid happens to be at hand, whether or not it is fit for consumption. It involves solitary alcohol abuse, with loss of all other interests. These crises recur at indeterminate intervals, separated by periods when the subject is generally sober and may even manifest repugnance for alcohol and intense remorse over his or her conduct. These recurring attacks may be associated with wandering tendencies (dromomania) or suicidal impulses.
    Sigmund Freud saw the fevered consumption of alcohol as a complex substitute for sexual obsession and the drunken stupor as a sort of twisted victory in that it successfully desensitized the pain caused by the avoided obsession and featured an alluring mastery of total passivity. Freud considered that motor acts, with or without wandering, were central to sexual obsession, and repetitive drinking was one of those motor skills.
    Whether or not Freud’s analysis was psychologically accurate, he offered profound insights into the alcoholic’s crises. “He never rested until he had lost everything,” Freud wrote. “Theirresistible nature of the