True. It has to do with certain liver enzymes that are responsible for breaking down alcohol. The ability to produce them in amounts sufficient to accommodate a drinking habit is a hereditary trait linked to the blood type, race, diet, climate, and the drinking habits of one's ancestors. Nature plus nurture...

Peoples that subsided mostly on meat (e.g., Innuits or Masai) typically lack the enzymes for processing alcohol. That's because these enzymes are originally intended by the body for the processing of naturally occurring alcohol that is a metabolite of digesting carbs, especially fruits and their sugars. Historic diets rich in fruits and grains will lay the foundation for alcohol-resistant peoples. If the ancestral environment didn't yield many (if any) of these foods, peoples that have adapted to the mostly-meat diets will have lost the need for these enzymes.

As a rule, digestive enzymes that have been abandoned for lack of demand on their production become fully activated again in the third or fourth generation that starts eating a certain food again... provided they were active during a certain prior evolutionary period. However, if it's something absent from our developmental history as a species altogether (e.g., a GM food, a microwaved food with stereometrically left-right flipped molecules, a designer drug comprized of molecules that do not naturally occur and never did, or a man-made environmental toxin with no evolutionary precedent), the body is not equipped to reach back to its "files" for a solution to this problem because it is a new problem, and if a metabolic venue that would provide such a solution is possible, it is yet to be created.

I suspect cancer is one such experiment the body embarks on in the process of trying to figure out what NEW things to do FAST in order to handle all the new demands. Just trying to cope... trying new ways every which way, because there's no falling back on our evolutionary experience in our new and oh so improved environment.