I think that governments in Western society do use a lot of fear, force, and violence, and I also think that the government in 1984 used entertainment and distraction (drugs not so much, unless you count the rationing of cigarettes and victory gin).
Note that at the time Orwell was writing, the only epidemiological research linking lung cancer and heart disease with smoking had been carried out by doctors working in Nazi Germany -- research which was tainted with guilt by association. (It took epidemiologist Sir Richard Doll another decade to independently make a conclusive case that the lung cancer epidemic was the result of smoking.) Smoking was tending towards a habit shared by 50% of the male population of the UK Orwell lived in; it was as unexceptional as tea or coffee.
Alcohol is a depressant and exactly the sort of bad habit a dictatorship with an unhealthy interest in its' subjects mental states might want to encourage. Think too much: anaesthetize yourself! It's also very hard to clamp down on bathtub distilleries.
Reading your comment, I was reminded of the hypothesis that the 17-18th century cultural shift from alcohol to coffee was a contributing factor in the Enlightenment.
Also note that drinking one of small beer or coffee (substitute tea to taste) was a great way of ensuring that your fluid intake wasn't contaminated with viable cholera bacilli. Adding alcohol or boiling water would kill them before they killed you. Which, before the discovery of the germ theory of disease and the development of sewage treatment farms, was pretty important.
