By M. Asadi

As a chemical agent of social control, alcohol is employed by the elite for pacification of the masses. Historically the colonial elite, in their racist use of language explicitly admitted deploying alcoholic beverages to "domesticate" the natives. The use of alcohol to dominate the Native Americans, the effect of which they suffer from (as a group) even today (see ref 1) as well the supply of alcoholic beverages higher in their concentration of ethanol (Kilbourne 1999) to the Black ghettos, are well know facts.

The use of alcohol as "escape mechanism" provides an outlet for chemically pacifying feelings of alienation that exist within a capitalist mode of production. Alienation is the driving force behind social change. If you get rid of alienation through chemical intoxication, similar to the use of psychiatric drugs, you kill the "motor" that drives social revolutions. Alcohol is therefore an "opium" more effective, explicit and not requiring any cognitive manipulation, compared to the legitimizing function played by religion in capitalist societies.

The oppressed have a greater propensity of alienation and therefore a greater potential for demanding social change. As a result, the more oppressed the group the greater is the effort made by the elite to make them dependent on alcohol. Women born after WW2 in the U.S. show a greater risk of alcohol dependency compared to women born before 1943. This period coincides in time with when women were being incorporated into the economic structure and gender boundaries were breaking down in the U.S. This led to a two prong effort by the elite to control them: i) the state sponsored construction of the nuclear family and the forced role of women as housewives and ii) their forced dependency on alcohol due to a lifestyle that was alienating (Gans 1967). What is inhumane and sexist in this pushing of alcohol to women is the fact that biologically alcohol harms women much more than it does men because of the less effectiveness of alcohol dehydrogenaise, the enzyme in the stomach that neutralizes ethanol (60-70% less effective in women): a substance the body treats as a poison. Brain damage and cirrhosis of the liver sets in much quicker in women who consume alcoholic beverages compared to men (see Ref #4).

Writing more than a century and a half back, Marx (in 1844) stated that the "English Gin Houses" were the symbolic (cultural) manifestation of the capitalist mode of production. An example of its "artificially created crudeness" in humanity through "self stupification" (see Ref #3).

Within this context the failure of prohibition in the United States (the 18th Amendment, 1919) can be directly attributed to a kind of 'manufactured failure' by the elite. Once alcohol consumption becomes part of a culture due to structural support, it gets associated with status enhancement, with "being cool" and its entrapping mechanism becomes even more effective, as does its wide scale abuse. Given the nature of the substance and the resulting human catastrophe not only in medical/biological terms but in terms of identity and memory formation, is unprecedented in its effectiveness as 'voluntary social control agent' and cannot be matched by direct coercive control which is much cruder and less effective. In other words the "human soul" so to speak is butchered through the use of alcohol due to its suppression of the only guard humanity possesses in their society, emotional discrimination based on outside stimuli. Once this discrimination is lost through alcohol dependency, all sovereignty and liberty is lost.

Alcohol's use and abuse among the populace represents a latent use of a 'perfect plan', a form of chemical warfare by the elite to enslave humanity through cultural and structural means on a macro level and their resulting chemical "slaughter" (both biological and psychological) on the micro level.

References:

1.http://www.facesandvoicesofrecovery.org/pdf/White/WOC review.alcoholbook.pdf (retrieved 10/24/'09)

2.http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa46.htm (retrieved 10/24/'09)

3.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/need s.htm (retrieved 10/24/'09)

4. Gans, Herbert. 1967. The Levittowners. USA: Pantheon Books.

5. Kilbourne, Jean. 1999. Deadly Persuasion. NewYork: The Free Press