You only notice the musty smell if you’re unfortunate enough to get stuck in a queue back past the bread plinth, towards the shanty town of chest freezers (the sliding doors are the backbone of each ageing unit rather than the doorway to claim Aunt Bessie’s Apple Pies and out of date Fab lollies. From the darker corner, six people deep in the line of dipsomaniacs, the mildew becomes noticeable, the shelves seem more yellow than cream and dust hangs on the rim of metal tins, clogging the air as winter jackets brush past the weeping shelves. Read the rest of this entry »

I hate the fact that Sarah has International Radio 1 on in each room of the house every morning, but I’ve got quite used to drowning it out. Today though, I couldn’t miss the news, in which the top story was about the new police powers to confiscate alcohol from under-age drinkers and bring in new laws to tackle persistent offenders. What grinded my gears though was the end of the piece, in which the enthusiastic news reader paraphrased the Conservative party’s comment on the news which I’ll re-paraphrase:

“These measures don’t go enough, if we get in we’ll raise taxes on alcopops and high strength beers.”

High strength beers? How are you classifying that? Beers that are over 2 or 3 units? Beers over 10% Anything stronger than a traditional dark mild? No mention of the simple fact that there are tons of other alcoholic drinks that can get you shit-faced a lot quicker and a lot more cheaply than even a head cracking barley wine.

Why does beer get the bad press when it comes to under age drinking? Something tells me I’m not going to see a bunch of 15 year olds (or perhaps 11 is it?!) swilling a bottle of imperial stout on a park bench. Nope, it’ll be a pocket-able bottle of methylated spirit and a few cheap cans from the corner shop. Taxing ‘high strength beer’ will have about as much chance of stopping under-age drinking as Manchester United do of winning the FA Cup this year.

This week is all about health and alcohol, binge drinking and the ridiculous attempts to win voters round with lies, damned lies and statistics. The debates rages across blogs; off- and online media report the press releases rather than investigating the true stories behind the official papers and reports; and I daresay a fair few people are a bit lost in the fast moving pace of the heated discussion¹. And I’m sure plenty of you will have heard much of what I have to say before as well.

I’m not jumping in with any stats – the job done by Mr PBBB is fantastic in highlighting that Disraeli’s old adage is as true now as it ever has been. Even more so the comments added to his blog and to other blogs, and the subsequent inspired posts (in the UK and beyond) has led to real, interesting debate and points of view that aren’t immediately at the forefront of everybody’s minds.

I’d rather stay clear of quantitative or qualitative data and focus a little more on the reaction to all this, the where do we go from here. Stats aside, alcohol misuse, abuse, even just plain alcohol use does cause society problems, whether in conjunction with other factors of not, and that regardless of if that’s increasing or decreasing, it would be quite nice to stop some of it and make our country a better place.

In honour of all this I've used a lovely photo of some empty beer glasses to highlight the issues surrounding binge drinking... (thanks Julie!)

A few things strike me. One, that alcohol (or should I say the effects of abusing alcohol) is, like anything, intrinsically linked to behaviour and attitude and that isolating it as the sole cause of a specific misdemeanour or health issue seems, statistically, difficult. Anti-social behaviour (vandalism, crime, assaults), health issues (liver disease, injuries from being drunk) and other consequences (drink driving, loss of productivity) are all affected by numerous things – and many of the stats communicated to us by the powers that be seem to ignore this simple fact.

Secondly, it strikes me that there aren’t that many answers in the Great Alcohol Debate of 2010 and that’s not a criticism – it’s a delicate and complex matter. But what have the people sitting in Westminster done about this? Slammed producers of alcohol², branded publicans as irresponsible³ and patronised responsible drinkers who have continental, liberal attitudes⁴. Furthermore they’ve devised simplistic, slapstick tactics planned, from where I see it, simply to trick the public⁵. Banning dentist chairs? You really are out of touch with reality folks.

Two of the simplest points of all that undermine much of the policy makers outbursts have been made what seems like a thousand times (in one way or another) in the last 12 months but get little airplay with any major media outlet.

If people want to get drunk they will.

If an alcoholic wants a drink they will go to Tesco or the corner shop, they will buy a bottle of screw top wine/screw top vodka/ring pull cans of lager or bitter and they will head home, drinking them on the way most likely. If an alcoholic is hiding their problem from their family they will slip the bottle in their jacket⁶. They will hide a bottle under the sink⁷, in the toilet cistern⁸, in the greenhouse⁹.

If a young person wants to be the hardest bloke in town and wants the respect (fear) of everyone that heads out on a Friday night, he will get pissed and start a fight regardless of the price of a vodka red bull. If a young girl wants to throw spirits down their neck every evening and not have a job and shag around and stick two fingers up to society, they will. The price off alcohol won’t put them off.¹⁰

Alcoholics will find a drink if they want one. A simplistic view, yes, but one that my experience suggests is pretty accurate. Pic: phogel (not suggesting this chap is dependent on alcohol!)

Supermarkets sell alcohol cheaply yet legislators have been reluctant to go near the off-trade in this way. Picture: sergis blog

If people want to get drunk cheaply, they won’t buy fine wines or artisan beers

Yep, they’ll head for the offy, for the stack-em-on-the-floor-stack-em-high bargain outlets, for the supermarket. They’ll find it a lot more conducive to forgetting about live if they throw own brand vodka, aluminium beers and £1.99 white wine down their necks than ordering a Tokyo*, waiting 3 days for delivery and watching £17 (including delivery) disappear from their bank account.¹¹

There are lots of other ‘personas’ I can stereotype and situations I can try to second guess, some I have experience of some I don’t. I don’t have all the stats, I don’t have all the facts. But I know some of the psyche of both binge drinkers and alcoholics. I’ve lived the small town mentality of ‘going out’, ‘heading up the club’ and ‘getting smashed’ not that long ago. I matured and went to uni, I ‘got smashed’, I stayed out late, I missed lectures, I made friends for live, we did silly things. But fundamentally my attitudes towards society means that I consider myself a ‘law abiding citizen’, bar some breaches of copyright via music cassettes and being a month late with my vehicle tax. Oh and I owe the car park man £3.50 from last week and I haven’t reminded him on two occasions I’ve seen him since¹².

Some people are going to abuse alcohol, some people are going to abuse the goodwill society shows them and the opportunities they are presented with. Some people don’t have as many opportunities as others and this affects their behaviour in life. Some people have bad starts in live that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and those bad starts result in bad endings (of course many people start this way and end up ‘just fine’ as well). Some people have the best opportunities, great jobs, loving families, and fall into a downward spiral of disease that ruins their live). My point: you can change how you measure alcohol, you can faff about with pricing, you can ban adverts, ban references to alcohol, ban sponsorship and tell everyone alcohol will kill you. But you are never treating the problems.

An ad for ITV News juxtaposes happy images against a cold hard 'fact'. Unfortunately the visual representation highlights how easy it is to tarnish everyone with one brush

So, I urge I urge politicians, journalists and all those in the business of selling alcohol (whether on- or off-trade) to take a read of what is being said online this week and listen to a broader spectrum of opinions than less-than-independent-bodies¹³ and the scaremongering press releases¹⁴. Then not just consider, but actually try to do something about the real issues. Education, anti-social behaviour (for which alcohol is often a catalyst rather than a cause), alcoholism. Stop putting your nation of drinkers in one big basket promising to tax the high hell out of everything in easy-target-quick-win PR stunts. Tax where appropriate; tackle the attitudes that cause people to not give two flying fucks about anyone else around them and smash up our towns and cities when intoxicated; find help for victims of alcohol abuse before they fall into an A&E ward; encourage respect for alcohol, respect for the communities we live in and appreciation of the slog, the climb, the rewards of life rather than the quick fix, the instant gratification, the I-want-I-get attitude that underpins society today.

How do we, as a country do that? If I knew I’d be Prime Minister, or the next famous philosopher or anthropologist. But for a start, try being honest about alcohol rather than spinning data into PR-able facts. Be open about alcohol, don’t hide it behind closed doors. If I’m getting really adventurous I’d say let’s spread altruism across our schools and teach our children that they will be rewarded for helping others not punching others. Let’s nip anti-social tendencies and prejudice in the bud early on and encouraging people from a younger age to have a broader ‘group’ mentality. My youthful visions of utopia might not be realistic, but where else do we start?

And start by trawling our blog roll for blogs that have written superb words on the subject this week too…

¹ Me included.
² As an example, BrewDog Tokyo* on which you can find multiple online sources of ridiculous outrage at this beer and it’s potential to either cure binge drinking  or cause a beer based apocalypse, depending on your bias…I mean point of view.
³ Branding the whole industry as irresponsible is a bit harsh, many other sources I’ve read have made clearer distinctions.
⁴ I refer mainly to discussions with drinkers, beer bloggers and friends who feel like they have already adopted a responsible approach to drinking and that policies seem to neglect that and penalise their drinking habits with little effect on the problems they set out to solve (e.g. increasing taxes).
⁵ Such as this reported today in The Times and other media publishers
^{6, 7, 8 and 9} Seen them all done.
¹⁰ That’s my opinion, based on my growing up and drinking experience in Banbury, Lincoln, Nottingham, Leeds & more (and isn’t restricted to young people)
¹¹ That’s a fact that doesn’t require a footnote and I’ll retract it statement if anyone can argue it’s not true.
¹² Which I thoroughly intend to pay him after pay day!
¹³ I refer here to Melissa Cole here who I trust!
¹⁴ Read any newspapers websites over the last three months and the same article and stats are reported verbatim with little or no questioning. And I will blog on my digital marketing blog about this worrying trend in the next few days at http://digitalmediamonkey.co.uk