There is a peculiar contradiction visible in many contemporary university spaces. A section of urban, educated, self-described “progressive” students often celebrates alcohol consumption, recreational cannabis use, nightlife culture, and a rhetoric of personal freedom. At the same time, many among the same circles casually deploy moral labels such as “drunkard,” “addict,” “uncultured,” or “problematic” toward others whose drinking practices fall outside the boundaries of what their own class culture considers respectable. This contradiction is not merely individual hypocrisy; sociologists would argue that it reflects deeper structures of class, symbolic power, and moral distinction.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that cultural practices are often used by educated classes to mark distinction and superiority. Drinking itself is not the issue; rather, how, where, what, and by whom alcohol is consumed becomes socially coded. Wine at an intellectual gathering, craft beer in an urban café, or cannabis framed as “countercultural experimentation” may be treated as progressive and sophisticated. The same behaviour among poorer, rural, lower-caste, or socially marginal groups is frequently stigmatized as vulgarity, lack of discipline, or moral failure. Thus, substance use becomes filtered through class aesthetics and cultural capital rather than through any consistent ethical principle.

Sociological research on stigma supports this contradiction. Studies on alcohol and drug stigma show that societies often attach moral judgments not simply to substances, but to the social identities of users.   The sociologist Howard Becker, through labeling theory, argued that deviance is socially constructed: people become “deviant” not merely because of actions they perform, but because institutions and dominant groups attach labels to them.   In this framework, a university student drinking imported whiskey at a liberal arts gathering may be viewed as socially refined, while a daily wage labourer drinking local liquor may be branded a “drunkard,” despite both engaging in alcohol consumption.

Similarly, scholarship on cannabis culture demonstrates that educated youth cultures often normalize their own drug consumption while maintaining stigma toward others. Research on cannabis normalization in Europe found that even in liberal environments, users continue to experience selective forms of stigma and social distinction.   The issue therefore is not simply whether substances are consumed, but who possesses the social legitimacy to consume them without losing moral respectability.

This contradiction is also tied to what sociologists call performative progressivism. In many elite university environments, progressive identity is partly constructed through visible symbolic practices — supporting social justice causes, speaking the language of mental health, gender equality, minority rights, and personal freedom. Yet these same spaces can reproduce old forms of classism and moral hierarchy in subtler ways. The language changes, but the mechanism of exclusion remains. One may reject conservative morality publicly while privately reproducing distinctions between the “cultured consumer” and the “degenerate addict.”

The sociologist Erving Goffman described stigma as a process through which societies mark certain identities as socially tainted. Substance users often become targets of such stigma, especially when they belong to marginalized groups. Modern liberal spaces may appear tolerant, but tolerance itself is often conditional and selective. The “acceptable” drinker is usually one who possesses education, class privilege, urban sophistication, and the ability to present consumption as lifestyle rather than dependency.

Scholars of moral panic and deviance have long noted that societies create symbolic “folk devils” to preserve social order. Stanley Cohen famously argued that moral panics emerge when certain groups are constructed as threats to social values.   Interestingly, contemporary liberal environments can participate in this same process while imagining themselves free from conservatism. They may reject traditional religious morality yet still enforce social respectability through new moral vocabularies — wellness discourse, productivity culture, emotional intelligence, or “healthy lifestyles.”

The contradiction therefore is not accidental. It reflects a broader sociological reality: modern societies rarely eliminate moral judgment; they merely reorganize it. Liberal university cultures may reject older conservative codes, but they often create new symbolic hierarchies based on class, aesthetics, language, and performative respectability. Alcohol or cannabis use becomes acceptable when embedded within elite cultural capital, but shameful when associated with poverty, lack of education, or visible social disorder.

In that sense, the label “drunkard” is less a medical or ethical category and more a social one. It reveals who has the privilege to appear “experimental,” “free,” or “progressive,” and who is denied that legitimacy.