So I just stumbled onto this--never read this blog or whatever before--but have been pondering this subject since I came to college (currently a sophomore), so I thought I'd add something.
Alcohol and other drugs which gain a feeling of happiness, ecstasy, over-all good feeling, etc. do something I (and I hope others who examine the subject) find interesting, scary, and on a deep level wrong. You see, in life there are objects (include people, animals, etc into objects for simplicity's sake) that make us as people feel. This keyboard makes me feel a certain way in virtue of how the texture of it catches my fingers. And some things make me feel pleasure because of the nature of the thing, an easy example is sex, that makes people feel good in virtue of who it's with (in the best cases of course) as well as in virtue of the responses to the textures of...all involved (you know what I'm saying). Other things like thinking of a good friend or accomplishment make me feel a sense of well-being.
So to get to alcohol and other drugs: These things give you these feelings but it is not in direct response to what they actually are, instead it is in response to mere chemical reactions in your brain, and so this feeling of well-being and happiness you've got after having a little too much to drink is a feeling that cannot be linked back to anything real in the outside world, something outside yourself, it entirely in you, and that seems to me wrong. Real happiness is in virtue of something outside of you, not something that is only occurring chemically in your brain. To clarify the rightness and wrongness of this: enjoying the experience of the sip of fine wine, and enjoying thus the great creation of man that it is by enjoying the direct sensations of this object--taste--seems right, but when you have so much and feel pleasure laying in your bed doing nothing in virtue of the alcohol's affect on your brain this seems wrong. If you don't find this wrong, I wish I could feel the same, perhaps I think to much, but it's worth thinking about so you can decide for yourself when you have examined the specifics of the feelings, actions, states and processes involved in consuming alcohol whether you still enjoy it (or in the case of the article writer, continue to not enjoy it)
I dislike drinking myself (I mean becoming drunk, I don't mind enjoying one drink's worth of a well-made alcohol), and all that I have said strikes me as suggesting making oneself drunk involves a profound ability to be selfishly self-absorbed. I never want to acquire this ability.