[corin_]

Big, big difference. If someone gets drunk at the same table as me they aren't doing me any harm, as long as they don't attack me, or drive me anywhere - that's a long way from sitting next to someone puffing away on a cigarette...

[Perceval]

The actual damages of alcohol to society are massive and well-documented: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11660210

Alcohol far and away leads the pack in causing harm to others.

[nagrom]

There have also been many studies that show that the idea that alcohol makes you agressive or dangerous are, to a large part, placebos (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3035442.stm). It seems that when people behave like dicks "due to alcohol", they're probably using the alcohol as an excuse just to behave like a dick. Getting rid of alcohol would likely force something else to be the socially-acceptable reason for being a dick - "The devil made me do it!"

[Perceval]

The link you provided does not say what you say it does.

Further, I find it hard to believe that the placebo effect is stronger than the well-documented effects of alcohol in impairing judgment, impairing the frontal lobe and motor skills, creating long-term changes to the reward circuits in the brain, and by lowering inhibitions on all forms of ill-advised behavior, which includes aggressive behavior.

[nagrom]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1403295/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7752640

I was originally looking to link to something less like a lab report, but you can see the original studies here, and in the references associated.

Basically, the more impaired you expect to be, the more impaired you become. So, if you expect alcohol to make you violent then you will behave more violently under the influence. Of course, one would question why, if you expect alcohol to make you violent, you would drink at all - other than to use it as an excuse to behave like a dick.

Alcohol will affect your reaction time and your motor co-ordination. It makes you feel awful the next day as the liver is taxed by removing the poisons from your system. It's an addictive substance and is associated with a myriad of substance abuse problems.

Whilst it is true that alcohol will have an effect on your body chemistry, it does not make you violent, it does not make you behave badly or aggressively. Those behaviours come from within you. Alcohol is not an excuse for behaving like a dick; it may, however, be something that you accept as an excuse for letting out the dickish behaviour you wish to display.

I don't know of any scientific studies that show that alcohol lowers inhibitions, but the above studies (and the references in their bibliographies) show that people will lower their inhibitions when they think they are consuming alcohol, regardless of the alcohol content of the drink.

[Perceval]

You're right that alcohol doesn't transform a normal person into an aggressive person, but it does lower inhibitions to otherwise anti-social or ill-advised behavior.

Here's a meta-study of studies investigating alcohol and aggression which comes to this conclusion: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bbushman/bc90.pdf