I have to wonder whether there ever was a golden age of drunken professors, or whether in fact I merely romanticize what can be considered an abominable trait in anyone, academic or otherwise. More than one of my undergraduate profs imbibed, and did so frequently. And indeed, on many occasions I was asked to accompany my betters on their journeys to the local watering troughs, whereupon they bought me booze, and we drank, and everyone went away happy.
Early years in graduate school were not so different. My most brilliant professor couldn’t keep away from the scotch in the late afternoons. Before that, likely as not he could be found having a two or three beer lunch at a bar just off campus. He introduced me to the importance of a cold one just before teaching, a practice that in my weakness I wasn’t able to keep up. 
One brilliant evening at a department party he fell headlong out of the screen door and was in for certain doom–a concrete porch and four-foot drop to the driveway below–before I caught him by the barest thread and pulled him home. On another occasion, his friends abandoned him at my apartment, so tired were they of his excessive devotion to the bottle that evening. And I thought he was just having a swell time.
But as I said, he was a brilliant fellow and good fun to have around. Eccentric and not long for this planet, but necessary nevertheless.
These delightful people would seem to have disappeared. Is it me, or has academia cleaned itself up of late? With the loss of the G.I. generation and the imminent (and not too soon) retirements of the boomers, where are we to turn for good ole fashioned non-p.c. boozy fun?
As for drugs, forget about it. Even the hip hippy profs now running the show barely know where to find a joint, so wrapped up are they in their retirement portfolios.
When will the new eccentrics emerge?
My only encounter with an openly drunk professor was not so rosy, not nearly as rosy as the network of broken blood vessels on his nose. I was in his class on Ancient Greek History in which he would turn up to teach three sheets to the wind, as my mother would say. I was naive at the time and did not recognize his slurred speech and surly attitude as a sign of his long established alcoholism. He took a special disliking to me; one time, I asked a question, and he simply sucked the snot out of his throat and made a show of swallowing it while maintaining crazy eye-contact with me. Someone must have gotten on him, however; that next semester, he would come up to me in hall and be over-the-top friendly.
Ferguson: Maybe you just asked him the wrong question. Maybe you should have invited him out for a drink.
I think he was a “mean drunk” rather than a jovial, sloppy drunk. Rather than imparting hours of boozy wisdom about life lived the hard way, I probably would have spent most of the evening listening to him rant about either a) his bitch wife, b) his dickhead dean who doesn’t appreciate real scholarship, c) the jews who control the world banking system or d) all of the above.