Are you seriously calling violent behavior while intoxicated anecdotal? The effects on mood, aggression and all sort of other factors have been carefully studied for alcohol. These studies have controlled for potential confounders, such as environment and sex (also a potential effect modifier).

If you'd like specific article references, I can paste links you'll never follow. Otherwise, you could use scholar.google.com to search for, say, "alcohol violence".


---------

paper quotes


"It was argued that the data from human and animal studies indicated that the causal basis of alcohol-related violence was most complex and it was unlikely that this drug should influence such behaviour through a single mechanism eg by increasing ‘aggression’. It seemed that within the same category of violence a number of plausible explanations for the action of alcohol existed and that this drug might simultaneously contribute to the completion of violent acts in a number of ways."

----
(a study on felons)

"The findings were interpreted as being consistent with the hypothesis that alcohol effects violence directly, acting through the acute effects of use, rather than indirectly through the effects of underlying or mediating factors."


And so on.

There are a lot of bad statisticians with PhDs running around. It's too bad there are undergrad psych majors stinking up science too.