If alcohol is a drug, then drug use is normal, and not all drug use is abuse. That undercuts the entire project of stigmatization underlying much of what passes for drug abuse prevention. If smoking cannabis, snorting cocaine, swallowing MDMA (ecstasy), or even injecting heroin are not different in principle from having a glass of wine, then the moral basis for treating cannabis-smokers, cocaine-snorters, rave-goers, and heroin-injectors as carriers of a deadly plague is called into question, and even suppliers of those drugs might be seen as regulatory violators rather than hostes humani generic (enemies of humankind), the modern incarnation of a legal category that used to cover pirates and slave-traders.

Conversely, labeling alcohol a "drug," given the nasty connotations that word has been so carefully given, calls into question the presumptive innocence and innocuousness of drinking by responsible, non-alcoholic adults, and of the industry that supplies them, as it also supplies children, alcoholics, and those who become violent and imprudent under the influence of drink. To the analytically minded it seems perverse that the one-eighth or so of diagnosable substance abuse disorder (other than nicotine dependency) that relates to the controlled drugs should receive much more attention (whether measured by rhetoric or control resources) than the seven-eighths in which the problem substance is alcohol.

Back when the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy (the "drug czar's" office) was new, I had a conversation with someone who was then a staffer and is now a senior official. When I suggested the office ought to include alcohol among its targets, he fairly snarled, "Don't change the subject!" Someone of a psychodynamic or cultural-critical turn of mind might be inclined to turn that response around and consider the current social and political formulation of the drug problem as a massive displacement mechanism, an effort to "change the subject" from the one drug that claims the majority of the addicts and accounts for the vast bulk of drug-related deaths and drug-related violence.

What Cook and Reuter propose is nothing less than a moral revolution. If current attitudes overstate the evils of drugs and understate those of alcohol, if current policies are excessively harsh on drug users and dealers excessively loose about the use and supply of alcoholic beverages, then that revolution might bring both sets of policies closer to their respective optima. To the vast majority whose views the current laws reflect, treating alcohol as a drug would be not only an instance of moral confusion, but also an invitation to policies both unduly lenient toward wrongdoing and unduly meddlesome about normal, innocent pleasures and comforts. That the proposed revolution reflects a scientific consensus would be, to that majority, at best a cold comfort.