Asimov wrote in 1969, three days after the historic Apollo 11 moon landing:
I got a letter from a reader who wrote to berate me on the expense of the space program and telling me I ought to be ashamed for not spending the money on the cities and the poor.
I wrote back to say that the people of the United States spend exactly as much money on booze alone as on the space program. And if you add tobacco, drugs, cosmetics, and worthless patent medicines (and chewing gum, suggests Carl Sagan), then we spend far more on these useless-to-harmful substances than on space exploration.
(Asimov’s numbers are actually off – the real numbers were – and are – even more extreme, to the tune of $50 billion a year on alcohol compared to NASA’s entire annual budget of $18 billion).
I should also note, however, that none of this should be construed as an attack on the critical importance of alcohol to the proper functioning of our civilization.