In a purely physical sense, alcohol intoxication can be considered to be an across the board incapacitation of normal brain function. Depending on the degree of intoxication, people have difficulty speaking clearly, accomplishing tasks like driving and walking, thinking, remembering and committing new experience to memory. The desire for this disruption of normal mental processes is at the heart of both social drinking and alcoholism.

While there are specific pharmacological effects of alcohol that contribute to social and alcoholic drinking, these are of little relative importance except as a general backdrop for expectancy effects. This is demonstrated in a rather humorous anthropological study done among the natives of the Truk Islands in Polynesia.137

Young males, not knowing one must drink alcohol to get drunk, became “intoxicated” by sniffing an empty bottle. They “lost control” of their behavior because they knew from seeing drunken outsiders what happened when people got drunk.

Because they were intoxicated, the village elders declined to punish them. Obviously the behavior was attributable to the alcohol, not the young men.

While this may seem extremely far fetched, there is ample concrete evidence that what is believed about the effects of alcohol, or other drugs, to a very large extent overrides the actual physiological effects of the chemical in terms of behavior and subjective experience.

In a study using hypnosis with heroin addicts, experimenters were able to produce, by suggestion, a drug “high” in their subjects complete with