I grew up in Russia, and managed to never drink. It did help that we saw a lot of drunks on the street. My mother would on occasion come home from work with an entertaining story about "a comrade" (the word people often used for Sir or Mister) that "was walking along a sinusoid". So when the time came to learn about a sinusoid in math, I already had an idea of what it was like!
It was not a rare occasion for a confused drunk to start banging on our door thinking that he came to his apartment. From a young age I learned some vocabulary - this happened often enough for the language to have just one word for those things: "спился" (drank himself to death or into serious illness), "пропил" (spent all of it on alcohol), "запой" (long drinking bout). Once in a while a neighbor would die - very often as a result of smoking and drinking. There would be a coffin right next to the apartment entrance door, a wreath, his wife sobbing bitterly and wearing black, funeral music, and the funeral bus to take the deceased and the family to the cemetery.
So from a young age I resolved to never touch alcohol - not even on special occasions. When I started running at the age of 11, this resolve got even stronger. When I joined the LDS Church at age of 19, I made it a matter of a special covenant between myself and the Lord. I credit in part what I have been able to achieve in running to my resolve to abstain from alcohol and other harmful substances. But this pales in comparison to how this has enabled me to get married, stay married, and be a father to ten children.