Does Alcohol Help Or Hinder Creative Thinking?

Execupundit.com: Was Hemingway's Skill Booze-Driven?. Put me in the camp of those, like Execupundit, who think that, overall, alcohol impedes creative thought and productive work. While it may, in the beginning, liberate a mind to ponder more creative ideas, and to take risks in writing, I think it impedes good judgment when done to excess. There is a reason we call it "drunk dialing" or "drunk texting". Great authors write because they must. They drink, those who do, for the same reasons other people drink. The better question is to ask how many more great novels Hemingway could have written if his demons didn't prompt him to drink in the first place?