Happy Fourth of July! (Or Independence Day, if you want to be all fancy about it.) Today marks the 240th birthday of the old U.S. of A.

Some of us will celebrate with barbecue. Some of us will celebrate with one or two cold ones. And some of us will celebrate with a lot of cold ones.

While some of us drink a lot, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are programs that give people the tools to help treat alcohol abuse and drug addictions. People are recognizing that substance use disorder is a medical and psychological disorder and are constantly developing ways to treat it.

American attitudes about drinking and taking drugs have changed through the years. If you look at the behaviors of the founding fathers in the late 1700s, you’ll see that those people really drank. And drank a lot. They frequently drank beer, wine, hard cider, and rum, and in larger amounts than your average American today.

Some people say that this is because clean, disease-free drinking water was harder to attain in the 1700s. This argument has some merit, but most of the founding fathers were wealthy or better-off financially than many of their counterparts. If anyone could afford clean (or cleaner) drinking water, it would be these men.

Others argue that the founding fathers’ drinking stems from their roots in Great Britain. Alcohol was not just a drink, it was a tool to bind the community together. In this tradition, drinking alcohol just an accepted part of one’s social life. Could the pubs of Great Britain be carrying on this tradition?

The founding fathers, then, might have been rebelling against the Brits politically, but certainly not when it came to alcohol. Modern Americans, of course, do not drink those amounts of alcohol. Attitudes about drinking have changed in 240 years, just like a lot of other things.

Have a happy and safe Fourth of July, everyone!