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As a philosophical hedonist, I am fully on board with the rock-n-roll defenders. It is true that, in our current age of neo-prohibition and general queasiness about risk, we desperately need to be clear about the simple joy of feeling good. In defending the functions of intoxicant use, let us never lose sight of one of the greatest contributions of intoxicants to human life: sheer hedonic pleasure. As Stuart Walton observes in his brilliant, wickedly funny cultural history of intoxication, Out of It,122 βThere is a sedimentary layer of apologetics, of bashful, tittering euphemism, at the bottom of all talk about alcohol as an intoxicant that was laid down in the nineteenth century, which not even the liberal revolution of the 1960s quite managed to dislodge.
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Edward Slingerland (Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization)