When we drink these day, the world drinks with us. Rory Cahill looks at the globalisation of drunkenness and asks what measures we can really take to stem the flood of booze
It’s late on a summer night in central Edinburgh as the pubs are emptying out and a group of young Italians are talking loudly and drinking takeaway coffee and generally being Italian. Coming up the road, a group of local lads visibly the worse for wear.
As is the way with these things, it happens quickly. One of the Scottish lads stumbles over to the Italians and starts talking to a girl in the group. She shies away. He persists. One of her male friends approaches and voices are raised. Then suddenly, a flurry of shouts and fists and the young Italian man is on the ground, blood streaming from his nose.
The attacker retreats slowly, swearing and shouting imprecations. He rejoins his group and they make their way off, singing proudly. A passer-by goes to offer assistance to the Italian man who has been punched.
“Why would he do that?” asks the Italian, distressed at having been a victim of such random and cruel violence. “Why would he do that?”
Why indeed? Is there really something in the Scottish psyche that predisposes us to drink, and drunken violence? Are we really that bad? Or is the public drunkenness and disorder on our streets part of a wider global trend? If we lift up our eyes and stop gazing at our navels in despair, will we see that even in Mediterranean countries we once held up, and often still do, as models of restraint when it comes to consuming alcohol, that similar problems are apparent?
There’s no doubting that Scotland has a problem with drink. Everyone agrees with that. The issue is what we do about it. The new Government has promised tough and innovative measures and everyone applauds them for that, apart from the small issue of disagreeing with many of the measures themselves, most notably, the plan to raise the age at which off-sales purchases can be made from 18 to 21. But to truly have an effect on problem drinking in this country, and its associated social harms, like increased violence, we need to understand the context in which this is occurring.
But first, some sobering statistics demonstrating how alcohol consumption and violence so often go together. An NHS survey shows that 70 per cent of assault cases presenting at accident and emergency wards are alcohol related and 67 per cent of those who are victims of assault thought their assailant was drunk. Half of those accused of homicide in Scotland are drunk when the crime is committed. In 2002/03, alcohol-related crime cost Scotland £277m and in total, alcohol misuse costs Scotland around £2.25 billion per year.
And we don’t just hurt others when we drink, we hurt ourselves too. There were 2,372 alcohol-related deaths in Scotland in 2005 - the equivalent of 33 full double-decker buses. Alcohol lowers sperm count in men and fertility in women and as a nation, we lose 640,000 working days every year due to people taking time off because of their drinking.
But while we are some of the world leaders in alcohol consumption – the UK is in the top ten consumers in the world – with one in three men and one in four women in Scotland exceeding recommended daily limits, it is vital to understand that we are not alone. While it would be churlish to take comfort in the idea that ‘everyone else is doing it too’, we do need to understand that the world as a whole, especially the West, is drinking more, and vitally, they are increasingly drinking the same way. Getting pished is being globalised.
Take France. We have long thought, and our cousins across the Channel have been keen to support the notion, that the French have a mature relationship with booze. They introduce young people to wine early, but as just one part of a wider dining or social experience. They drink to complement food or as a function of a social occasion, but drinking to get drunk, falling down loud and rowdy drunk was something only the gauche rosbifs do.
Except now young French people are drinking to get drunk, and often in public, in behaviour that mirrors that seen in town centres across Britain. A recent French government survey found that of 30,000 17 year olds questioned, 12 per cent qualify as regular drinkers, and of those, 26 per cent regularly get drunk, up from 19 per cent in 2002. Even more shocking for the French, half of all French teenagers confess to having been drunk in the last month.
Writing in The Guardian, Dr Phillipe Batel, an alcohol specialist at Beaujon hospital in the town of Clichy, argues that what is occurring in France is classic British-style alcohol abuse.
He says:
“It is becoming an issue. Statistics are never completely clear, of course, but it’s clear there is a significant change in behaviour under way - there’s now a real trend among French youths to drink more regularly, usually at weekends; to drink more; to drink outside, in the streets; and to drink in order to get smashed. All that is really quite new in France and it corresponds quite closely to the British definition of binge drinking.”
In typical French style, the Government is planning a series of measures to restrict access to alcohol for young people, in particular, the kind of alcopops that have never before formed a part of Gallic drinking culture.
But the French are not alone. The Spanish are also experiencing problems with large groups of young people drinking to get drunk in public. Young people in Spain have developed el bottellon (literally, ‘the big bottle’) a practice where large groups, sometimes into the thousands, of young people gather in public squares and spaces to drink large bottles of cheap supermarket-bought spirits they have mixed with soft drinks like Coke.
Again, the statistics demonstrate a cultural sea change is under way in Spanish drinking habits. A 2005 report by the Spanish health ministry found that the number of 15 to 19-year-old boys in Spain who regularly
get drunk doubled from 22 per cent to 44 per cent between 2002 and 2004, with a rise from 10 per cent to 24 per cent among girls.
El bottellon has even spread to staid, reserved Switzerland, where Lausanne, Bern and Zurich have taken measures to ban the practice after an event this July attended by 1,300 young people saw dozens hospitalised because of excessive drinking and drink-related assaults.
So what is happening here? How in the space of a few years have we seen what was once largely a ‘British disease’ spread across Europe
How in the space of a few years have we seen what was once largely a ‘British disease’ spread across Europe 
, to places where the inhabitants thought themselves immune to such behaviour?
Dr John Fitzgerald, principal research fellow with VicHealth, the health arm of the State Government of Victoria, has been studying a similar explosion of public drinking and associated disorder in the city of Melbourne. He argues that as alcohol producers have become increasingly centralised into large global operations, so drinking cultures have become more uniform.
“It seems that we are seeing a more global push. It may be related to a change in drinking styles and cultures more generally. I think what’s really apparent is that the producers of alcohol have changed over the last ten years from being local, particular beverage producers to global companies, so, for instance, Fosters turned from being an Australian beer producer to a global producer of beer, wine and spirits. And you’ve got companies like Diageo where they’ve gone for things that are more like ‘portfolio drinking’ or ‘total beverage approach’ where what we used to have was particular regional styles of drinking. We are increasingly seeing the globalisation of drinking itself. And it’s because alcohol producers are increasingly large corporate groups that don’t just focus on one beverage or one region.
“You find that Fosters services markets in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania. Diageo has a global reach. What they can do is create a global drinking culture rather than just local and regional ones. So I don’t think it’s any surprise that with the rise of global alcohol producers, we have started seeing global trends in alcohol consumption rather than regional ones,” he says.
The evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, seems to support this view, and it is one shared by a French government team investigating the rise of binge drinking in that country. But what can we do to combat this trend, and are any of the measures proposed by the Scottish Government – some of which, like having separate counters for alcohol sales in supermarkets, are already used in places like Victoria – likely to have a noticeable effect on our behaviour?
Fitzgerald says that only one idea proposed by the Government - introducing a minimum price per unit of alcohol - is likely to have any real effect on the amount we drink.
“The one thing we know that works to reduce consumption more broadly is taxation. Alcohol is price sensitive. One thing that is a bit of a red herring is only to tax isolated categories of beverage like alcopops. Essentially, the companies are very well positioned to actually displace consumption from one category to another because the way they understand their consumers is that their consumers are not one beverage consumers.
“For instance, one of the producer companies here in Australia judged that about 50 per cent of its market are cross-category drinkers, so if you tax one category, the consumption will just shift into another category. Broad-based consumption like taxing per unit of alcohol would work,” he says.
Asked about the idea of raising the age requirement for off-sales purchases to 21, Fitzgerald says such an idea has only ever worked in extremely isolated areas, like outback Australian communities. This view will be welcomed by Tom French, spokesman for the Campaign Against Raising the Drinking Age in Scotland (CARDAS), a group set up by student and youth groups, including the NUS and Scottish Youth Parliament, to lobby against any such change.
While some mutter darkly about the group’s links with trade bodies, CARDAS is correct when it points out many of the flaws in the SNP plan.
“Our first concern is the rights and responsibilities issue, which gets young people passionate. There is the issue that they are old enough and mature enough to make serious decisions themselves about their lives and the lives of others and they are expected to make a full contribution to society by the age of 18, like they are expected to vote, they can get married, have kids, go to war, you can even own a pub, but under these plans, you wouldn’t be able to buy stock.
“In the US, they raised the age more than 20 years ago and you’ve seen no positive effect on alcohol misuse. Under-age drinking rates are still high, you still have high levels of binge drinking and excessive consumption and anti-social behaviour related to alcohol misuse,” says French.
It is also important to remember that when we talk about alcohol and violence that the drink itself does not cause people to be violent, otherwise everyone who drank would be violent, which they are patently not. Alcohol may be a catalyst, but the latest research demonstrates that people with the capacity for violence are made that way long before they ever take their first sip of the demon drink.
Parental attitudes to violence are key in forming our own assumptions on when, or if ever, violence is acceptable, says George Hosking, director of the Wave Trust, which conducts research into causes of violence.
He says:
“Research from around the world consistently shows that the factors contributing to violent behaviour are parental control mechanisms and parental discipline methods. So parents who use violence in their daily interactions with their children, or who model violence like domestic violence in the household basically train children in the idea that violence is an acceptable strategy to deal with things that you are not happy with. I think that is pretty incontrovertible, given the international evidence that’s shown that.”
And, says Hosking, households where violence is common are those houses where incomes are lowest. It is the young men from these areas who are most likely to drink and commit crimes of violence when drunk. The same young men who have children early and repeat the same patterns.
So if we are to tackle our own drinking problem, we need to be honest with ourselves. Blaming violence simply on drunks is not good enough. The reasons are deeper seated than that and require an enormous investment of time and resources to effect change. And we need to recognise that the shape of the culture in which we drink, and more importantly, the shape of those who supply us with drink, has changed, and we must act accordingly.
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