Politics & Power Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs doesn’t lob this line like a policy proposal; he fires it like a diagnosis. Calling alcohol “our national drug” collapses the usual moral hierarchy in one blunt move. The trick is the pronoun: “our” turns a private vice into a civic habit, implicating respectable dinner tables as much as skid-row clichés. Then he swivels to the real target: the selective outrage that treats other substances as a kind of cultural contamination while letting booze pass as tradition, celebration, even adulthood itself.

The sentence works because it’s less about chemistry than about permission. Alcohol is the sanctioned solvent for loneliness, boredom, grief, social anxiety - the acceptable way to self-medicate in public. Burroughs, who wrote out of addiction’s interior and a lifetime of watching institutions decide which cravings are tolerable, is exposing the hypocrisy baked into American moral panic: we don’t fear “drugs” evenly, we fear the wrong people using them, in the wrong places, outside the rituals we’ve agreed to call normal.

Context matters. Burroughs emerges from mid-century America, when the state’s escalating war on narcotics coexisted with a booming alcohol industry and a culture of cocktail sophistication. His Beat-era cynicism reads today like an early autopsy of prohibitionist logic: criminalize the substances associated with outsiders; romanticize the one that keeps the mainstream humming. The “special horror” isn’t about harm reduction. It’s about maintaining a story of innocence while staying pleasantly sedated.