You might think, given that my paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother were both alcoholics,

That I would have but scant chance of not being an alcoholic, but--and I thank Almighty God (if that's who rolled my genetic dice)--that in actual fact I am not at all alcoholic:  I can drink till I'm quite tipsy, if the wines at dinner are particularly delicious, and still feel no ill effects the next morning. Or I can leave a bottle of wine half drunk for several weeks on top of my refrigerator, if it should happen during that while that I have nothing to eat that would taste good with it.  Wine or beer without food  (except for an occasional glass of sherry, or, perhaps, a gin rickey on a hot day) doesn't interest me, and the effect of alcohol in itself, generally, I find depressing and depressive; it absolutely does not get me "high."

If I had not had one dear friend (dead now twenty years next march) who was a bona fide alcoholic, and who assured me, under oath, that the experience of alcohol was always a "high" for him--and not simply a base, cowardly and mindless lifting of inhibitions--I might venture that no downer, alcohol, opiate or barbiturate, ever gets anyone high (in the sense that good sex, profound philosophy, perfect music, witty conversation, cannabis and qat get one, in fact, high).  So little indeed do I value the loss of inhibition. I must say, even, that my now two decades dead friend (despite how "high" he may have believed himself to be), was actually, when in his cups, an unpleasant, contentious swine. Does it matter that I despise downer freaks and think them, at best, deluded?  The problem is that there are so many of them (whose notion of a good time is losing their inhibitions), that despising them makes me virtually the enemy of most of my fellow humans. In a world of Dub Step, Hip Hop and Twerking, after all, a certain, foregone dismissive contempt of whatever presents itself is probably only prudent.