Before recorded history, human beings discovered that grape juice, when exposed to naturally occurring yeasts, becomes wine. Scientists would eventually describe this process as fermentation, thousands of years after wine and other alcoholic beverages...

Alcohol What Kind of Drug Is It? Alcohol is an ancient drug. Beer and wine jugs well over 5,000 years old have been excavated from archaeological sites in southwest Asia and northern Africa. Prehistoric peoples are thought to have produced the first...

This section contains articles on some aspects of chronic drinking: Abstinence versus Controlled Drinking and Origin of the Term. For further information on this subject, see Disease Concept of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse and the sections on...

Alcoholism is the popular term for two disorders: alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence. The key element of these disorders is that a person's use of alcohol has repeatedly caused problems in his or her life. Alcoholism has serious consequences...

Alcohol occurs naturally when fruits, vegetables, and grains exposed to bacteria in the air undergo the process of fermentation. People can create and speed up the conditions for fermentation to produce ethyl alcohol, also called ethanol. Pure ethanol...

Alcohol is a rather general term for a class of hydrocarbon compounds, and is widely used as a cleansing agent (for example to wipe the skin before an injection is made). But in everyday talk (and, for the most part, in PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY)...

Any of a class of common organic compounds that contain one or more hydroxyl groups (&singlehorzbond;OH) attached to one or more of the carbon atoms in a hydrocarbon chain. The number of other substituent groups (R) on that carbon atom make the alcohol...

Not a single compound, but one of a group of HYDROCARBONS in which a hydroxyl (i.e. a hydrogen/oxygen molecule, e.g. OH) molecule replaces a hydrocarbon (i.e. a hydrogen/carbon) bonding. Alcohols have the general formula of CnH2n+1OH. The simplest...

These are primary oxidation products of hydrocarbons and are classified as primary, secondary or tertiary, depending on where OH groups are attached to the molecule. Alcohols react with organic acids to form...

An organic compound having a hydroxyl (-OH) group attached. The lower molecular weight alcohols, methanol (CH3OH), ethanol (C2H5OH), and propanol (C3H7OH), are water...

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In chemistry, an alcohol is any organic compound in which a hydroxyl group (-OH) is bound to a carbon atom of an alkyl or substituted alkyl group. The general formula for a simple acyclic alcohol is CnH2n+1OH. In layman's terms, the word alcohol...