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That's a nice analogy but should it also apply to people who think there are demons living in their walls after they smoke crack or any other psychoactive drug. Very compulsive and out of character behavior isn't even that uncommon among drunks. I doubt it has that much to do with one's "true character".
It's in vino veritas, not in coca veritas or in LSD veritas. Trying to apply it to other drugs, or to mental illnesses, makes it iffy. Alcohol has a specific known effect by a specific mechanism. Positing a similarity to other substances will work in some ways but not others, I lack the experiences to speak to it.
If you told me she was tweaking on meth or tripping on acid, the whole tenor of the event changes doesn't it?
"In LSD veritas" was the CIA's motto in the 60s. They tried with alcohol, but determined that alcohol wasn't good enough to be used to determine anyone's true sentiments. (neither was LSD)
People react very differently to drunkeness. Some get sad, violent, horny, lethargic, delusional or paranoid. Not all drunk behavior can be interpreted as uninhibited desire.
I would interpret most of those states as uninhibited desire in various forms. A sad drunk is sad inside all the time, the alcohol just leads them to drop the polite happy front they put up to keep moving through the day. A violent drunk is angry inside all the time, and the alcohol reduced the strength of their societal prohibition on violence. Our conscious can be forcing us to do all kinds of things, throughout the day I'm exerting my will to get excited or to stay calm or to stand up for myself or to stand down when I'm in the wrong. Alcohol throws all that haywire, but it doesn't create new urges.
For that matter, over time I've noticed that there are different kinds of violent drunks. A violent drunk who gets in my face after he gets rivered in stud is understandable, most people would be angry after that and the alcohol weakened his ability to avoid it. A violent drunk who attacks a vietnamese man at random would be someone I would avoid getting drunk with in the future, they have that inside them all the time.
Why does alcohol 'reveal desires' but other drugs not though? I don't think neuroscience is developed enough to conclude that "alcohol reveals desires" mechanistically.
I literally linked multiple pieces explaining the well studied link between alcohol and suppressing the PFC, and its role.
Your first piece is from an addiction center. In my experience browsing the web, addiction center webpages are often just an amalgam of various science-sounding claims that don't really mean anything but very emphatically suggest that addiction is bad, and scientific, and should be treated. They're just not worth reading. That doesn't mean any individual claim on the website is wrong, just that one shouldn't cite them. Wikipedia is leagues above them.
The prefrontal cortex does a whole bunch of things. Plausibly even most things.
That sounds like it covers all complex human behaviors, honestly (also imo this part of neuroscience is very messy and a lot of it is wrong, given how complicated people and their actions are, what is 'moderating social behavior', exactly, can we really attribute that to a brain region rather than much more complex higher level interaction, blablabla). And if you're suppressing all of that - that's not going to 'reveal true hidden desires', it's just gonna mess everything up. But impulses aren't discrete or ... real in any sense, they're just vague descriptions of complex, useful actions made by a complex system. A desire to be racist - like, if I read a bunch of studies and, like scott alexander, regretfully decide that there probably are racial differences in IQ, am I desiring to be racist? Why is there necessarily an innate desire to be racist component that's distinct from a complex network making decisions, and knocking out some parts of that, making it worse, might lead to things that 'sound racist', but that doesn't tell us anything direct about the desires of a person. Consider tourettes or harm OCD (and I could go on another tangent about that) - these people do not have a suppressed desire to say slurs or kill people in a normal sense, yet 'express' or 'feel' them anyway!
I'd argue that the PFC both 'suppresses impulsive behavior' and 'generates impulsive behavior', but not even in an absolute sense, as part of a really complicated set of interactions we don't really understand. So going from 'alcohol affects PFC + PFC suppresses behavior' -> 'alcohol releases suppressed behavior as a primary and separable effect' just isn't a reasonable conclusion - honestly, 'behaviors' aren't even a fixed thing, and 'suppressing an existing impulse' doesn't necessarily have any meaning outside some useful context. And in particular, concluding that 'in wino veritas' is not justified at all.
Your other source is "DRUNK - How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization - BY EDWARD SLINGERLAND", who is a a Canadian-American sinologist and philosopher. He is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Again, not exactly a systematic review.
Slingerland's book actually goes into a great deal of neuroscience research on the topic. It's a great work of pop-sci, I highly recommend it.
Desire might be the wrong framing. Belief in racism, which one naturally wishes to express but typically restrains for politeness, might be a better framing?
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