In defence of binge drinking
Lucia Hodgson
I am a firm believer in the redemptive qualities of alcohol. Any minor failure, casual provocation, or slight humiliation is enough to convince me that what I need is a long, slow soak in an ocean of booze. Only once my blood stream is comprehensively saturated, only once the world is spinning at light-speed on its axis, can I begin to relax again and let all my anxieties drift gently off into the abyss. At moments like that it truly becomes clear that in this liquid intoxicant, I have made a friend for life.
But the Scottish Government is trying to call time on my relationship with the bottle; it’s trying to drive a wedge between us. It has announced plans to put an end to the unbridled joy of an indulgent liquor-fuelled night. The Scottish Government says that there are too many mouth-watering incentives on offer to tempt me into drinking. I say: what else is there to do? Drinking has always been a part of Scottish culture; for centuries it has gifted vitality to this cold, dark corner of northern Europe.
Tory MSP Murdo Fraser addressed the booze question in the Scottish Parliament at the beginning of November. He called excessive alcohol consumption a “scourge on Scottish society”. The Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon — leader of the crusade against drinking — wants to punish the majority for the mistreatment of alcohol by the minority. The First Minister Alex Salmond is convinced that I should pay at least £4.50 for a bottle of wine. I would be on the streets if I could stand.
So, long gone will be the days of stacking up on vodka doubles during happy hour. Cheap, high strength favourites amongst heavy drinkers, such as white cider or supermarket own brands, will be banished to oblivion (that is, subject to a new per-unit pricing law).
But taxing the consumer is not going to change the incomparable pleasure of getting drunk. No authority is going to impose sobriety on me. Surely, it should be my choice to purchase alcohol after 10pm. Surely, I should be entitled to slowly corrode my liver, rot my gut, and ruin my looks. Granted, there is a good chance I will, at some stage, end up face down in A&E, but (and read this bit carefully) the cost of alcohol-related admissions doesn’t seem so unreasonable when we consider the amount ploughed into the economy by alcohol tax revenue. According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies, alcohol revenue in the UK brought in nearly £14 billion in 2004-05. The same body calculated NHS costs attributed to alcohol misuse in 2006-07 at £405 million. I’m sure there’s a handsome profit margin in there somewhere.
A huge amount of revenue will be lost every year if alcohol is made as costly as the new measures propose. Studies of alcohol-related illnesses and hospital admissions in Scotland rarely mention the lucrative remuneration of alcohol VAT sales.
Essentially, politicians are reluctant to admit that alcohol consumption is doing the government a favour. The truth is that during the worst recession in living memory, the more we drink — even better, the more we drink at an expensive price — the more the government benefits. The state faces a two-pronged dilemma. If they go ahead with their minimum-price plan and attempt to solve the ‘binge drinking problem’, they will be presented with a new black hole in the national finances.
Previous government campaigns to curb excessive alcohol consumption have been childish, patronising, and (surprisingly!) ineffective. Articles attacking binge drinking are often accompanied by stereotypical images, either of audacious women having a good time in clubs, or (as seen on the BBC website) an image of a teen in a Burberry cap drinking Buckfast. The clichés the media has adopted towards drinkers — that they are all abhorrent teenagers, ‘ladettes’ or working class — only further alienates us from the debate, especially when one considers that Britain’s middle classes are a famously gin-soaked bunch.
The Daily Mail may well stigmatise the enjoyment of drinking — categorising it as pastime likely to be frowned upon by anyone who can afford security tagged liquor brands — but I imagine more than a few of its most ardent readers will spend their afternoons alone with a crate of toxic, bargain-basement, Californian wine.
The state’s wild desire to restrain the alleged evils of binge drinking has led us to ignore a more disheartening aspect of cheap alcohol — the mass exodus from British pubs. The pub industry has faced a trading battle since the price of supermarket alcohol fell sharply. Minimum pricing will only exacerbate this problem, as the price of a pub pint rises even more. If we really don’t want to see traditional pubs going under then we need to use existing laws more effectively, or at least exempt pubs from the minimum pricing laws. There are already enough ways to commit an offence as a drunk person, and the government must realise that attempts to tackle binge drinking won’t be successful by piling new ineffective laws on top of old, underused, ones.
I can’t help but notice that all of this is being propagated by the bone-dry, humourless puritans that populate our parliament. I can’t help but notice that all this strongly echoes Scotland’s ultra-conservative Calvinist past. I note that John Knox’s hatred of fun would make any self-respecting member of the Taliban blush; that Scotland’s medieval Protestant foot-soldiers, were they alive today, would make Mullah Omar look like Alan Carr. Our MSP’s want to force us to salvation, and they’re not going to ask twice. Why can’t we all just admit that there will always be, no matter how many disincentives you introduce, people who wish to consume large amounts of alcohol (and I will always be one of them, no matter how many interventions my parents stage).
I will say this clearly: more expensive drinks certainly won’t stop me from knocking back my fourth or my fifth or my sixth (nothing will stop me downing my seventh). All my social awkwardness just drains from my body after a gin and tonic, a fifth of scotch and water eradicates my shyness, a few white Russians constitute my antidote to neuroticism.
Alcohol makes everything better, no matter how hard my head bangs in the morning, and I deny the government any right to take that feeling away from me. Binge drinking keeps our pubs in business and my self-confidence at a momentary high. I raise my glass to it.
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This is one of the most disgusting articles I have ever had the misfortune to read. Quite obviously, Lucia Hodgson has never been to a chemotherapy clinic where they also carry out blood transfusions for patients suffering from liver failure. I have and it is not a pleasant sight. Furthermore, Lucia Hodgson has obvious personality defects and I feel immensely sorry for her. If you have ‘neuroticism’ and ’shyness’, how about working on your confidence instead of turning to drink? If you only have half a personality when you’re drunk, I’d be amazed to meet you when you’re sober. In this article you’re trying to portray yourself as the common person, the common ’student voice’, and quite frankly I am ashamed to go to the same university as you. How can you possibly justify girls getting off their faces? It’s quite possibly one of the most dangerous aspects of student life. What about girls who walk home drunk? What about the high levels of sexual attacks in the West End of Glasgow alone? Has Lucia Hodgson even considered in her tiny and narrow minded perception of the world that maybe Britain’s alcohol culture is something to try and change, and that it should not be part of our culture? It’s one of the few things I completely resent about being British and wish that in future we could adopt a different approach to alcohol as something not to abuse but to take in moderation.
And most importantly how dare you try and justify the strain put on the NHS by alcohol related illnesses? Maybe you have never had to rely on the NHS in a life or death matter, and if so you are very lucky. I cannot believe you have written this article, and that the paper allowed it to be published. It is poisonous and frankly insane. But I guess you were probably drunk at the time….
I was disappointed to read this article. Not because I am fervently opposed to its assumed sentiment, but because it serves not to argue a strong case for those of us that like to drink as much alcohol as our body permits, but to, in my opinion, make a mockery of ‘binge drinkers’ and the ‘journalism’ of this paper.
What I would expect from an article such as one entitled In defence of binge drinking, is a reaction to the government’s attempt to raise the price of cheap alcohol from the perspective of a ‘free citizen’ rightfully having access to affordable pleasure-seeking. The minority of those ‘abusing’ drink and setting an immoral, yet unrepresentative, standard soon follows this line of thought to complete the case for innocent Scots innocently being able to enjoy lower prices and higher intoxication. The government, or anyone for that matter, should not try and stand in the way. How liberal is our liberal democracy if the state forces lifestyle choices upon us? Should only those able to afford binge drinking be the ones able to do it? Even dipping a toe into the idea of a traditional drinking culture, that defines, in some way, us as Scots, is a promising notion to argue the case for a ‘binge drinker’. However, the first paragraph, indeed, the first 35 words, seem to be taking the piss out of a rather serious subject. Unfortunately, leaning a little to the light-hearted side was not the eventual problem with Lucia’s contribution.
At best, I can describe this article as ‘one of those stupid conversations’ – usually complimented by a harsh hangover – that everyone has from time-to-time. Lucia had obviously been thinking some ‘stuff’, and decided to write it down quickly before she forgot. Her bold claim that the present financial downturn was the “worst in living memory” must have actually meant that it is the worst she can remember – fair enough. However, I reiterate that it is not about the harmless aspects of any imprecision or oddness in her argument, but the ignorance and the stupidity of its written form. Media clichés are obviously unhelpful but describing them as portraying “abhorrent teenagers, ‘ladettes’ or working class” sits uneasily with me. Surely anything abhorrent is abhorrent, so why would this be neatly described as the ‘working class’? I’m beginning to wonder if Lucia is in touch with the real world when she offers the image of an “ardent” Daily Mail reader – surveys and common sense should back-up this person as having a job or children to care for – spending the occasional (sorry those of you laughing at the back, this is not a one off) afternoon “alone with a crate of toxic, bargain basement, Californian wine”. So, our ‘famously out-of-touch’, seemingly middle class journalist has possibly enjoyed a ‘soak’ before writing the article and can be afforded some wild ideas. Class consciousness is not something we can take for granted. We grit our teeth and carry on to find such phrases as “there are already enough ways to commit an offence as a drunk person” and a misguided idea that raising prices of cheap alcohol will condemn pubs and ‘exacerbate’ “the mass exodus from British pubs” to the supermarket (no, but, prices going up in supermarkets… pubs will be forgotten as people spend money buying more expensive ‘cheap’ booze… sorry?). My personal favourite, and the article’s equivalent of the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (yes, this is an inappropriate metaphor), essentially removes any credibility from the article and renders it personally unreadable, amounting to a parallel between the Scottish Parliament and the Taliban ruling force in Afghanistan. A sense of madness is introduced to the equation when Lucia proudly informs us of her Catholic faith on Facebook (I might add that Facebook stalking is not weird on the grounds of science and criticism). I can’t bring myself to check the religious views of every MSP but I can rest easily with the belief that they are nothing like those of John Knox or the atrocious Taliban hegemony in Afghanistan that was such a scourge to humanity that NATO led an invasion to topple the regime in 2001. Everyone knows this, and that 240 British soldiers, and counting, have given their lives for the cause. In this regard, Lucia’s light-hearted approach renders her argument unfit for publication in a popular newspaper. Insensitive and misguided are two relatively kind ways of summing up the comparison.
In the end, the final attempt to offend people and mock serious issues by pretending to be considered an alcoholic by her parents – if she is, and numerous ‘interventions’ have been staged, I’m sure that those who have suffered the plight of alcohol addiction would recommend giving it up rather than celebrating its destructive capabilities – hardly come unexpected. Long gone are those stimulating ideas of public money being better spent on saving us from alcohol related death than draining away as we shun booze for other past-times (this is not sarcasm). Perhaps a grain of truth can be extracted from the line “alcohol makes everything better” as we consider using its flammable properties on the printed article itself. But finally, all joking aside, I wonder whether the editor is sure about what is included in the Guardian, and I think that some articles could be given some careful screening before print. Next time I notice the paper lying around I will most likely avoid giving it a look-see.
some people need to learn to have fun!
O.M.G.