From soju bars in Seoul to cachaca cocktails in Brazil, the routines and rituals of alcohol consumption have deep cultural roots. But growing awareness of the ills that the bottle can bring - alcoholism, domestic violence, drunken driving - has left a lingering unease about the proper place of beer, wine and liquor in modern societies.

The American television series “Mad Men,” for example, depicts an early ‘60s advertising agency awash in booze: sherry in the morning, gin at lunch, whiskey in the afternoon. “Those years, for lunch, they used to drink three martinis,” Carlo Marioni, 65, a New York bartender, told Robert Simonson of The Times. “Then they’d come back before dinner for rusty nails, white spiders.”

But employers now are more circumspect about mixing work and drink. Cy Wakeman, president of a human resources firm in Iowa, said that when drinking with colleagues, “the risk is very high that something negative will come out of it,” Eilene Zimmerman reported in The Times.

Does the same hold true for wizards? Writing in The Times, Tara Parker-Pope said that some American parents were alarmed by drinking scenes in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the latest installment in the movies based on J. K. Rowling’s fantasy series. The teenage heroes Harry, Ron and Hermione drink a concoction called butterbeer. Dr. Christopher Welsh, a University of Maryland psychiatrist and addiction specialist, told Ms. Parker-Pope, “I hope parents can talk to their kids and tell them even though Harry Potter made that seem fun, that it isn’t O.K.”

Ms. Parker-Pope noted that non- American audiences were likely to see it differently. The United States sets its legal drinking age at 21, higher than most European, Asian and Latin American countries.

But in Australia, where the drinking age is 18, concerns about liquor have taken on urgency in some Aboriginal communities that have been decimated by addiction and violence. The federal government and some local Aboriginal governments are trying to limit alcohol availability in parts of the outback. “We know what life was like before alcohol,” Doreen Green, 65, an Aboriginal schoolteacher in Halls Creek, told Norimitsu Onishi of The Times. “We had a proud race of people, very together people. Then alcohol just took over.”

Despite alcohol’s social costs, there are social benefits as well - a fact recognized at the highest levels of government. In July, President Obama invited the aggrieved parties in a disputed arrest to have a beer together at the White House. A black Harvard professor and the white police officer who had charged him with disorderly conduct made the journey to Washington from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The media avidly reported the drink choices of each man (Mr. Obama had a light beer). Left mostly unspoken in the coverage was the assumption that the simple act of drinking together was a way to establish a bond, however fleeting, between strangers.

It is an assumption shared by the ad men of “Mad Men,” and maybe the wizards of Hogwarts as well. And it helps explain why, in many places, the bottle remains a fixture when people socialize. As they say in Ethiopia, “Letenachin!”

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Alcohol is a staple of social life as well as a cause of many problems.