The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the
use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of
consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific.
Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an
enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in
countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From
archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal
regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and
administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the
men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and
the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants
therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a
mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who
are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by
over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly
attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain
diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has
passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle".
It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the
symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks
of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command
the deference of the community; but the reputability that
attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its
force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon
the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive
indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the
current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of
women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional
distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced
peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class