Ayala,

Having lost two family members to alcohol, this article hits home. It distresses me deeply — and helplessly, given our love of anything that alters consciousness and is also legal- that we can ban cigarettes but that all efforts to ban alcohol are and probably always will be useless.

My father, a lifelong alcoholic who was in complete denial to his deathbed, used to push booze on me “for fellowship.” I am extremely fortunate that not only can I not stand the smell, the taste is appalling. I’ve been single most of my life, I travel all over the world. I can’t even imagine how much more vulnerable I’d have been had I been a drinker.

This doesn’t make me right and anyone else wrong. However, given that I know I have an addictive personality, I’m monumentally fortunate that substance abuse of any kind never appealed to me. God how lucky. That said, I am appalled at the alcohol abuse (and deaths of) teens, the romanticizing and glorification of what the body, in its infinite wisdom, knows as poison. It’s just poison. Any bleary-eyed look in the mirror on January 1 is proof, pure and simple. Period.

That said, that’s not going stop the industry from marketing the luxury of drinking ancient (poison), without also advising that old, new or mellowed, it’s still. Fucking.Poison.