How the health lobby is driving me to drink

Wednesday October 22, 2008

If you enjoy four or more glasses of beer or wine in an evening you are a binge-drinker. Simon Clark reports.

This week I spoke at a seminar organised by the Westminster Health Forum. The title was “Alcohol and Responsibility”. My session concerned binge drinking.

I began my presentation by telling the audience – which included MPs, peers and civil servants – that the problem of binge drinking is exaggerated.

According to Alcohol Concern, 40% of all male drinking sessions are binge-drinking sessions; likewise 22% of female drinking sessions; and binge-drinking has risen significantly over the last three years.

We’re told that it’s a cause of considerable national expense; hospital admissions directly linked to excess alcohol have more than doubled in the past 10 years; alcohol-related crimes and accidents have risen sharply; it causes domestic violence; traffic accidents etc etc.

Anti-social

We’re told that Britain’s drinking culture is costing the country £20 billion a year; that 17 million working days are lost to hangovers and drink-related illness each year; that 40% of A&E admissions are alcohol-related, and that between midnight and 5.00am that figure rises to 70%.

We’re also told that “5.9 million people drink more than twice the recommended daily guidelines on some occasions” as if this is a terrible, anti-social thing to do!!

I’m sorry, but statistics such as these – some of which appear to have been plucked out of thin air – leave me utterly sceptical. I accept that there ARE cases where alcohol has a destructive or damaging impact on individuals and those around them.

But do those cases justify a major assault on our drinking habits or the way that society reacts to people having a few glasses of wine, or a few pints of beer?

Light-headed

One reason why the scale of the problem is exaggerated is because the definition of binge drinking has changed: ten years ago, it was “ten or more drinks in one session”. Now, apparently, it’s ten or more units for men, seven for women. (A half pint of beer or lager is one unit; a glass of wine is two units, so you can see the difference it makes.)

I’ve even seen a definition of binge drinking to be “drinking sufficient alcohol to reach a state of intoxication”. Now if that’s a definition of a binge drinker, I’ll hold my hand up and say that I binge drink at least three times a week.

Like many people, I often have three or four glasses of wine, or 2-3 pints of beer, in the evening – and yes, it leaves me feeling a little light-headed (some would call that intoxicated) – but I think that’s rather a nice feeling after a hard day’s work.

Am I a threat to my family, to my neighbours, to society? I think not. Yet if I were to tell a researcher about my alcohol intake I would no doubt become a binge drinking statistic and added to the “growing number” of binge drinkers that – we are told – is becoming such a burden on society.

Passive drinkers

My concern is that if the scale of the problem is exaggerated, then the reaction to the problem will also be exaggerated. A classic example is Boris Johnson’s ban on taking alcohol on to the Tube.

This ban is totally unnecessary. It is out of all proportion to the problem. There was no culture of boozing on London buses or Tube trains. Sure, a relatively small number of people may be drunk while travelling on London Transport – but they don’t get drunk on the bus or Tube. They’re drunk already.

Meanwhile, a new “at risk” group has been invented. I’m talking about ‘passive drinkers’. We’ve seen this with passive smoking, and it’s happening all over again with alcohol. ‘Passive drinking’ sounds absurd until you download a leaflet on the Alcohol Health Alliance’s website:

Under the title ‘Why do we need an Alcohol Health Alliance’ it reads: “The ‘passive effects’ of alcohol misuse are catastrophic – rape, sexual assault, domestic and other violence, drunk driving and street disorder – alcohol affects thousands more innocent victims than passive smoking.”

Talk about Armageddon! I’m not saying these things never happen, but this apocalyptic vision of Britain is so overblown that it suggests a country unrecognisable from one that most of us are familiar with.

Legal product

Alcohol is a legal consumer product. Adults have every right to purchase alcohol, to consume alcohol, and to enjoy alcohol. I’ll go further – people have every right to binge drink or get drunk, if they so wish.

And if, when they get drunk, they become boorish or bad-tempered, fall asleep in their chair or wake up with a hangover, they have every right to do that as well.

What they DON’T have the right to do is to become violent or aggressive or threaten people and damage property. But we already have laws – and a police force – to deter that sort of behaviour, so I see no need for yet more rules and regulations.

Many of the current anti-drinking campaigns imply that anyone who gets drunk is behaving in an anti-social manner. Rubbish! Lots of people get drunk every day, every week – this doesn’t make them reprehensible, or a danger to themselves or anyone else.

In most cases it doesn’t even make them anti-social. So why brand every drinker who gets drunk – or “binge drinks” – with the same brush?

Counter-productive

Some campaigns are potentially counter-productive. Raise the tax on booze, for example, will hit the elderly and those on low incomes. It could even spell the end of even more pubs and clubs. Worse, it will could provoke a smuggling epidemic – with result that lots of cheap booze will be readily available on the black market.

Display warnings on how many units of alcohol are contained in drinks served by the glass – and some drinkers will almost certainly opt for those that will intoxicate them the quickest.

Restrictions on drinks such as alcopops or a ban on drinking outside could result in teenagers switching to stronger drinks or drinking out of sight of adults – a far more dangerous situation, I would have thought. (Let’s face it – prohibition rarely works. It simply drives the activity under ground where it is less controllable.)

Other measures are said to include bans on drinking alcohol in public throughout towns and cities, even in public parks; a pre-watershed ban on TV advertising; health warnings on bottles of alcohol; bans on so-called “happy hours” in pubs and clubs.

Responsible adults

Like Boris Johnson’s booze ban, these are not just unnecessary – across the board – but the overall impact is to treat all adults like children. And if you treat people like children they will almost certainly behave like children.

If you want people to behave like responsible adults you need to let them work out how much they can and can’t drink, not set the standard for them, especially as we can all drink different amounts.

Within reason, we should also be allowed to drink where and when we want. Increasingly, councils want to ban drinking in public parks. Why? If someone – or a group of people – are behaving in a drunk and disorderly manner, laws exist to stop them.

Why should ordinary law-abiding adults be refused the chance to have a glass or two of wine with family and friends at a picnic, for example? What are the chances that anything untoward is going to happen?

There is no causal link between drink and crime or violence. Most people drink without committing a crime.

Puritanical obsession

I believe that many of these campaigns are political. We live in a world where politicians are determined to be seen to be doing something. In practice, that means that our lives are being micro-managed in a way that was undreamt of a generation or so ago.

Like smoking, there is now a moralistic, puritanical obsession with drinking that I find deeply disturbing.

We don’t need people telling us how to live our lives. In my view a hangover is nature’s way of telling people that drinking too much isn’t a very clever thing to do. The same is true of vomiting.

Do we really need the nanny state to tell us that drinking too much is bad for us? I can’t imagine there are many people who have never experienced a hangover or been sick after drinking too much.

Many of us experience it quite a lot when we’re young – in most cases we grow out of it. It’s called growing up, and as long as people aren’t breaking any laws I don’t see what their behaviour has to do with the state.

Unique position

The importance of the pub – and therefore drinking – in British society should not be underestimated. A recent report by the Social Issues Research Centre, commissioned by Greene King, found that although there may be fewer pubs in relation to the population than there were 50 or 60 years ago, the pub retains a unique position in British society.

According to the report, “the idea of participation is crucial to understanding what pubs, and locals in particular, are all about – why people are attracted to them and why they endure as a focus for social networks even in this digital age of online communities.

The report continues: “Having a drink (rather than just drinking) is essentially a social act – and the special features of the pub (the layout, the décor, the music, the games, the etiquette and, of course, the drinking) are all designed to promote positive social interaction.”

“In almost all drinking-places, in almost all cultures, the unwritten laws and customs involve some form of reciprocal drink-buying or sharing of drinks … This practice has been documented [and] long been recognized by anthropologists, sociologists ad even zoologists [as] fundamental … to the survival of any social species.”

Social activity

For many people, having a drink is a social activity yet – according to another definition – binge drinking is associated not just with drinking a certain number of units in a certain period of time, but the simple act of drinking in a large group.

That sounds pretty sociable to me – far better than sitting at home alone in front of a computer – yet campaigners would have us to believe that binge-drinking is anti-social.

In some cases, excessive drinking may result in anti-social behaviour, but I would argue, very strongly, that this is not the norm – and so-called binge-drinkers should NOT be made to feel guilty for the simple act of drinking, whether alone or as part of a larger group, unless they commit a criminal offence which the overwhelming majority never do.

Meanwhile many booze bans are being introduced with little or no public debate. They are simply being imposed on us – often at the instigation of a small but vociferous minority or unnecessarily fussy local councils and licensing boards.

Common sense

My concern is where this is all leading us. If I thought for one moment that politicians and health campaigners would tackle this issue with a bit of common sense, I would be far more positive.

Unfortunately politicians and the health industry never know when to stop. They are always looking for the next logical step. We’ve seen it with smoking, and I’m no doubt that we’ll experience it with drinking.

But I’ve witnessed at close hand the war on tobacco and I have seen the distortion of scientific evidence, the deliberate attempt to denormalise smoking and humiliate the consumer, and I worry that the war on alcohol will follow a very similar path.

Social etiquette should be set by society not officials. The idea that government should tell us how much to drink is patronizing and offensive.

The only impact these petty regulations, notices, warnings and laws will have on people’s drinking is in taking the joy out of it.

Simon Clark is director of Forest and The Free Society