I can't comment from regular direct experience because I don't drink alcohol at all, but I have observed its effects thousands of times as a nightclub DJ, and as a regular concert-goer.
My observations on alcohol when I was a teenager, was that people used it to 'loosen up' - to become more relaxed in social situations, and I believe that this is the reason why most people drink 'socially'.
Within the last couple of decades, a new approach to alcohol has formed, where a 'good night out' is defined as a enduring a serious dose of alcohol poisoning, and then talking about it the next day.
This means that people with the express intention of becoming drunk, hence the drinking before going out, in order to save money on pub prices, and also have a head start on the end result.
I do think it is very easy to slip from social 'relaxation' drinking into being drunk, simply because awareness of the amount consumed and the effect becomes more blurred the more one drinks, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
That is not to say that every drinker slides uncontrolled into a stupor - the vast majority of social drinkers have worked out the limit of their comfortable intake, and stop when they reach it, but many more lose the ability to judge, and simply carry on until incapable.
So, to address the original question, I think we in the UK have a culture where being drunk is seen as the measure of having a good time, and binge drinking - rather than drinking for the pleasure of a drink as the Europeans do - is the default status for a lot of people out on a weekend.
This is not new, and its obviousness only underlined the fatuousness of the government's 'café culture' tomfoolery in relaxing licencing laws.
So yes, people do get drunk on purpose, because culturally, it is seen as the way to show everyone that you are having a good time - or not!