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Background and Thesis
For about seven-thousand years, human beings have been intrigued and intoxicated by
the consumption of alcohol. Produced through a process known as fermentation, the origin of its
discovery is still unknown but the chances seem reasonable that this happened by accident.
Fermentation is a chemical reaction that occurs naturally when yeast, a microscopic plant that
floats freely in the air, reacts with food that contains sugar. Alcohol can be created from the
sugar in berries and fruits, which ferments as they become overripe due to yeast. Grains from
wheat, rye, and barley also have natural sugars that be transformed into alcohol as they age.
Biologists have discovered that birds and other wild animals can become intoxicated when eating
too much fermented foods.
During the eighth century in Arabia, distillation was discovered, only to be rediscovered
five hundred years later by Arnold de Villeneuve, who was a professor at the University of
Montpelier in France. Distillation occurs when a fermented beverage is heated until it vaporizes;
the vapor is then cooled until it condenses again into a liquid, which has a much higher alcohol
concentration. Distillation allowed people to produce pure alcohol, now known as whiskey.
Wine making has also been around for thousands of years. Made from grapes, wine is mentioned
in historical documents from Mesopotamia dating as far back as 3000 B.C. The most
distinguished type of wine is champagne, which was created in 1688 by Dom Pierre Perignon.
There is a famous brand of champagne that bears Perignon’s name.
Beginning on January 17, 1920, the United States passed legislation and the eighteenth
amendment went into effect, also known as the “Prohibition Act”, which banned the use,
production, and sales of alcohol. Many Americans rebelled against the “Prohibition Act”, calling
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it unconstitutional, violating the first amendment due to religious beliefs of using wine in their
churches.
In today’s society, alcoholic beverages can be found in stores around the globe. Michael
Uschan writes that alcohol is “the drug of choice for most Americans” (Uschan 64). In the
United States, alcohol is legal and can easily be purchased by an adult due to “The National
Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984”, which allowed twenty-one year olds to purchase and
publicly obtain alcoholic beverages. The fact that Americans are still divided over alcohol use in
the twenty-first century is not surprising. In one form or another, the debate over controlling
alcohol has enraged America for over two hundred years. Alcohol has caused plentiful of
problems throughout the United States, specifically families and college students. Peter Katel
states that “They are focusing in part on binge drinking, which has been shown to have a strong
link to sexual assaults” (Katel 1). About six-hundred thousand students suffer from assaults that
resulted from drinking, which doubled 2008. Families suffer from or through alcoholism whether
they are married into alcoholism or influenced. Lesser and Gilbert state that “Mary Anne’s
parents and sometimes her friends drink beer and wine at their home. They are happy it’s just
alcohol” (Lessa and Gilbert 1). Alcohol should be limited to society because alcohol ruins the
lives of many people, thus harmful to society.
Opposition
Many people have different perspectives when it comes to the use of alcohol: it generates
business sales in and out of the United States; that it is used as a social drink; and it has some
health benefits.
Ratified on December 5th, 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment allows states to regulate
the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. State regulations vary widely but the majority
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of the states have laws identifying which alcoholic beverages must be sold in specific stores and
also specifying which may be sold in other venues. As of August of 2012, there are over forty-
two thousand liquor stores located throughout the United States. Many of these liquor stores
carry popular alcoholic beverages such as Heineken, Budweiser, Vodka, Tequila, Margaritas,
and Absinthe. Wine is distributed globally, almost covering the entire world, having an alcohol
content between eight to fifteen percent. The U.S. alcohol industry is a major contributor to the
economy, totaling four-hundred billion dollars in sales for the economic activity in 2010,
generating nearly ninety billion dollars in wages, thus creating over three million jobs for U.S.
workers. Distilled spirits is still one of the highest consumer taxed product. Distilled spirits
accounted for over one-hundred twenty billion dollars in total economic activity, or thirty percent
of total economic activity from all beverage alcohol industries. They also contributed over forty-
