[Hot Tabasco]

alcohol has done as much for American Indians

I served in the Army in Panama with a 100% native Indian named Kai. He very seldom drank but when he did, look out, he would literally go crazy. I remember being asleep in my bunk one night when he came back from town drunk. He kicked in the door of the taxi and when he got up to our floor he started beating the crap out of his friend who was fast asleep in the bunk next to Kai's......It was very ugly that night.

[Smokin' Joe]

Europeans forget we had centuries, if not millenia, for the problem drinkers to fall off the oxcart and be crushed before producing progeny. Nature favored those who could hold their mud, so to speak, and even then, those of European Ancestry are not completely free of problems with alcohol.

For the peoples of the New World, alcohol was an exotic and new drug, one which often has ill effect on individuals, family, and culture even today, and which met with none of the genetic winnowing which European cultures had endured.

Besides, why drink rotten berry juice when the water was clean enough to drink?