Drinking: how matters

Why are some people able to "handle their booze" - drink without negative short term and long term consequences - while others completely fall apart?

The Camba [Bolivian tribe profiled in the article] had weekly benders with laboratory-proof alcohol, and, Dwight Heath said, "There was no social pathology—none. No arguments, no disputes, no sexual aggression, no verbal aggression. There was pleasant conversation or silence." On the Brown University campus, a few blocks away, beer—which is to Camba rum approximately what a peashooter is to a bazooka—was known to reduce the student population to a raging hormonal frenzy on Friday nights. "The drinking didn't interfere with work," Heath went on. "It didn't bring in the police. And there was no alcoholism, either."

It turns, large part of the answer may be cultural.

Sappio and Trotta do not drink for the same purpose as the Camba: alcohol has no larger social or emotional reward. It's food, consumed according to the same quotidian rhythms as pasta or cheese. But the content of the rules matters less than the fact of the rule, the existence of a drinking regimen that both encourages and constrains alcohol's use.

Full Gladwell article.