A lot of drug use is self-medication. It might well be that the unhappiness might have caused the alcohol drinking and not the other way around.

Housman wrote: "Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man", and it's true.

I've always had a decent relationship with alcohol, sometimes months go by without my drinking booze even though I enjoy it, but the night my mother died, I found a bottle of wine she had stashed somewhere (she never drank much, not at all after she got sick, but she kept alcohol around for guests), drank most of it, had a cry, and felt considerably better.

In another world, where my life was much more tragic, I might have been an alcoholic like my grandfather.