The Demon Drink!

It was budget day yesterday and our Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, has made the usual measures of increasing fuel and road taxes and adding extra duty to alcohol. Fair enough, nothing newsworthy there then. It sounds like the usual pretending to be the good guys (read, "fashionably ecological") whilst being nothing of the sort. For an example of this consider our government's increase in tax on high-polluting cars as compared to their insistence on building yet more runways at Heathrow and Stansted

Booze
What caught my attention was the "reason" for the price rise on booze. According to the radio news this morning it was aimed at curbing "binge-drinking culture". Binge-drinking is the latest fashionable way to sell sensationalist newspapers by selling us the latest recycled horror stories of how society is about to crumble into violent chaos because the "youth of today" are doing something their elders don't approve of. Thus, we must attempt to legislate against it - or more cynically, use it to acquire extra tax funds from the general public. Perhaps even Mr. darling believes that we live in an ever-increasing binged-out drunken culture.

Do we?
But do we? Is drinking any more prevalent now than it was at any time in the past, and if it is what are its effects?

I started drinking at around the age of 15/16, as did most of my peers. At the time nobody had heard of the term binge-drinking, you just got drunk. The papers were, of course, full of the latest youth-related horrors which were about to tip society over the edge. I seem to recall it being glue-sniffing at the time.

That was more than 25 years ago. I'm not an alcoholic although I do enjoy a drink 2-3 evenings a week and I do get quite drunk sometimes. Society, it appears, is still standing.

My dad was one of society's young drinkers in the 1950's as was his dad in the 1930's and his dad at the turn of the 20th century. They all drank, their friends drank, their girlfriends drank and they all got thoroughly plastered quite often. They lived in a binge-drinking culture and yet society is still standing after all this time (even if they weren't!).

Gin
In the 18th century William Hogarth produced some very popular satirical cartoons of lower-class gin drinkers containing a moral message about the evils of gin as compared to the proper British drink of beer (marijuana versus wine, anybody?). Gin was also a fashionable evil in the mid 19th century, allowing Charlotte Bronte, in Jayne Eyre, to use it as the reason why the Mad-Woman-In-The-Attic's nurse allowed her to escape periodically and wreak havoc. Funnily enough people were happily drinking wine, and brandy, throughout the rest of the book. It was normal. And occasionally people overdid it - maybe they lived in a binge-drinking culture.

In the late 16th century Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a tract for his son warning him about the evils of over-drinking, especially wine. Shakespeare makes a popular comedic hero of his character, Falstaff because drunkenness was not only common it was, and often still is, funny. Rabelais, at roughly the same time was writing about his great, lusty hero, Pantagruel specifically for his fellow boozers. They wrote these things because they lived in a binge-drinking culture.

Chaucer, nearly 700 years ago, made drunkards the primary characters in his Pardoner's Tale, and drinking too much as a theme in The Wife of Bath because boozing was so common it was normal.

Pre-history
It strikes me that the world has had binge-drinking since alcohol was discovered, and especially since we discovered how to make it ourselves. Our western society, supposedly based on biblical teachings and morality, is built on wine and drinking. Jesus produced gallons of the stuff, and Noah was traditionally the first to get pished after planting the first vines, and look at what happened to Lot!
The bible actually mentions drunkenness - as a moral failing - over seventy times. The various peoples of the bible, over the extremely long period that book covers, appear to have lived in a series of binge-drinking cultures.

Back to Booze
The newspapers and Mr. Darling MP are absolutely right, we do live in a binge-drinking culture. What they haven't mentioned is that we've always lived in a binge-drinking culture. Our society won't collapse if a lot of 19 year-olds get plastered at a weekend - it hasn't done so far - and in fact it may be a social necessity.

I'll leave the last word on binge-drinking to the self-sufficiency writer, John Seymour who puts the whole concept into a perfect nutshell:

"During the war we had a company brewer in every company of the King's African Rifles. He brewed once a week, and would brew beer out of absolutely any kind of grain or grain meal that he could lay his hands on. Most of it was pretty horrible stuff but it kept us sane."

Sláinte!
Seán