Alkie, wino, hobo, drunk and bum are just a few of the names dished out. They are spirited, fun-loving and bubbly. Intoxication at a private function is one thing, on a street corner quite another.
Similar contradictions exist in our attitudes to harder drugs.
After all, there is no shortage of evidence that heroin addiction afflicts people from a range of backgrounds and classes. But our ideas about what a heroin addict looks like are skewed by what we see on the streets. But these indigents are surely just the tip of a very large iceberg. It is a drug enjoyed behind closed doors. It is true that cocaine is not leading to overdose deaths in anything like the numbers heroin is, and this is undoubtedly one of the reasons why so little public, media and police attention is paid to the drug.