[Alcohol--historical aspects].

Alcoholic beverages have been produced already in a remote past. The recipe for distillated wine dates about 1100 A.D. Up to 1990 and longer, wine and alcoholic spirits were taken as an universal medicine. Alcohol has, moreover, socially integrative elements. Individual problems of alcohol abuse are as old as the production, but have become an epidemic problem with the pauperisation of the industrial proletarians in the 18th and 19th century, where private and government actions have been taken.