Not long ago a young scientist won first prize in a high school science fair with an exhibit of her experiments with spiders and their webs. Her project involved a comparison between the webs spun by normal spiders and those spun by spiders under the influence of alcohol.

At first the girl collected a number of common house spiders for her experiment, but she had difficulty with them. When she injected the wine directly into them, they all dropped dead. Then she adopted the plan of feeding wine-injected flies to the spiders. The spiders did not die, but they did not spin webs, either. Somewhat discouraged, she took her problem to her teacher and learned that house spiders are not much for making webs. They simply make strands of silk that are strung in all directions with no particular pattern. She was advised to find some of the common garden species, long know for their talent for constructing beautiful orb webs.

Thus encouraged, the girl again got busy with her project. She found a number of garden spiders and fed them wine-injected flies. This time her efforts were rewarded. The drunken spiders began to spin all sorts of wild and unorganized webs that did not at all resemble the intricate and near-perfect designs they were able to spin under normal circumstances.

After eating the spiked flies, a spider would begin spinning frantically, totally without method or reason. And the tipsy creature would keep on spinning without stopping until it passed out cold. The master weaver was confused at its ancient art. It and its web reminded one of the all-too-familiar "morning after the night before."

Each of us is weaving a pattern of life and we need all our abilities under control to do it properly. We will not be able to do this if we take into our bodies alcohol, or any other substance that wrongly affects us in any way. "Whosoever is deceived...{by those substances} is not wise."