This is my own opinion, perhaps most strongly influenced by my own generation and culture. I do drink, but not a lot. I was one of the lucky ones who boozed it up when I was younger, managed to escape addiction and just sort of grew out of wanting to be drunk.

Back to the 70's, when I got into folk music, drinking was part of the culture. We stayed up all night and consumed mass quantities of alcoholic beverages, got stupid-drunk and laughed a lot. There are stories of musicians passing out mid-tune and regaining conciousness to pick up where they left off. These are recounted with respect and a bit of awe.

Flash forward to now. We see how the drinking was fun right up to the point where we realized that we could "grow up" and stop and some of our friends couldn't. We see the people who maintained this lifestyle, the ones who haven't died of alcohol related problems, as physical and mental wrecks. We talk of them and say "It's a shame...had so much potential..." We hear stories on the news of kids dying from acute alcohol poisoning and think how similar their story is to the one about the guy who passed out in the middle of the tune, the only difference being he woke up and they didn't. We see the drunks on stage now as people to be pitied, because they don't have enough self control to make it through a gig - a job -without getting plastered.

Maybe it's the wisdom of age, or just hindsight. Maybe it's because when we're young, we're immortal. We don't worry about picking up habits that will one day make us miserable and perhaps kill us, because it will happen to someone else - not us. Or maybe it's because society really has changed, and getting loaded is no longer seen as acceptable fun. Whatever has happened to make our views change, we look at a drunk musician on a stage, and see all sorts of things besides a drunk musician on a stage. Sometimes we're just embarrassed for them. Sometimes we can see the ghosts of people we've known who were killed by drunk drivers or drinking. Sometimes we can see someone who's pretty far down the road to their own hell, if not already in it, and it's just hard to simply put that aside and just enjoy the music.