The basic public health approach to alcohol assumes that drinkers get no benefit from drinking. That assumption underlies most of the big “social cost of drinking” figures you hear. The social cost of cell phones would be huge too, if you assumed nobody enjoyed using them and then counted any spending on more than a bargain model as being a social cost.
Dunbar et al do some thinking about the benefits of social drinking:
Alcohol use has a long and ubiquitous history. Despite considerable research on the misuse of alcohol, no one has ever asked why it might have become universally adopted, although the conventional view assumes that its only benefit is hedonic. In contrast, we suggest that alcohol consumption was adopted because it has social benefits that relate both to health and social bonding. We combine data from a national survey with data from more detailed behavioural and observational…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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