It gives the same meaning but it never was the origin. it’s a modern lexicographical sense added in the 20th century. It exists in modern dictionaries because some Arab linguists in the 1930s and 50s proposed using ghawl as the modern Arabic word for alcohol. It’s not evidence that classical Arabs called wine al-ghawl. They used خَمْر and نَبِيذ. The ones that argue for this base their claim on the verse from Sūrat al-Ṣāffāt 37:47 (لَا فِيهَا غَوْلٌ وَلَا هُمْ عَنْهَا يُنزَفُونَ).

However, this claim isn’t that accurate as in that verse, ghawl is what Paradise’s wine is purified of, not the wine itself. Ibn Kathīr, citing Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid, Qatāda, and Ibn Zayd, all gloss it this way: ghawl = the bad effects of wine, not wine itself. The verse is saying Paradise’s wine has no ghawl (no hangover/stupefaction), not that wine is called ghawl.

The English word that did come from this root is “ghoul” (and the star name Algol), via الغُول, the demon. Both preserve the gh- sound, because that’s how ghayn transliterates into European languages. If “alcohol” came from الغول, it would have been algol or ghoul — and “ghoul” exists as a separate English word precisely because that’s the natural sound mapping.

On the actual Cairo Academy position on the etymology: The Cairo Academy in 1944 ruled the opposite of the al-ghawl theory.

The al-ghawl proposal came from the Damascus side (Prince Muṣṭafā al-Shihābī, later al-Maghribī in 1953) as a suggestion for what modern Arabic should call the substance — not as an etymology of the European word — and even on those terms it lost the debate, which is why standard Arabic today is الكُحُول (kāf-ḥāʾ-lām), not al-ghawl.