Our addiction to alcohol isn’t a bit of fun

Daft, of course. Ridiculous. Except that if you visit London Bridge station this week you will come across an immense advert for “Mr Tipsy’s Down the Hatch! An immersive cocktail experience like never before!” For £39.50 you can enjoy live actors, music, dance and video projections in what is billed as “a refreshing post-lockdown thirst quencher”. My guess is that you’ll find similar offers to “quench your thirst” (a venerable euphemism for getting drunk) in almost any town or city in the country.

Not the same, eh? Well, a few weeks earlier the figures had been released for alcohol-related deaths in England and Wales in 2020, and at just over 7,400 these too were a record. In fact they were nearly 20 per cent higher than in 2019. Admissions to hospital related to booze reached a new peak at 1.26 million. Taking England alone, it’s estimated that heavy drinkers cost the NHS up to £3.5 billion a year. Nearly 40 per cent of reported incidents of violence in 2018 were perpetrated by people said by their victims to be inebriated.

You want to understand geographical health inequalities? Then just look at the stats for where alcohol-related deaths are highest. In England, South Cambridgeshire recorded two deaths per 100,000 in 2017-19. In South Tyneside it was 22 per 100,000, 11 times higher.

I have a shedload more stats but you get the point. In any case you can see it with your own eyes, from the tanked-up fans who trashed Leicester Square last month to the morning-after-the-night-before residue regularly deposited for the rest of us to contemplate. My physio, training to be a paramedic, told me that the most depressing thing about being on ambulance duty was that half of the cases the crew dealt with were down to alcohol, some involving a level of degradation I can’t even describe here. Stuck for four hours in A&E with a distressed child or elderly relative? Two of those hours are down to someone else’s drinking.

So how do we talk about this problem? One headline taken at random and describing the fact that the UK was the only country out of 21 surveyed to increase its alcohol intake during the pandemic read, “While Europe went dry… Britain boozed!” almost as though this was an achievement. In the last week the news from the “drink” industry that cocktails are becoming the favoured way for Britons to take their alcohol was treated as a matter of celebration. We’re all Tom Cruise now, hic.

For years I’ve felt like Tintin to society’s Captain Haddock: on the sidelines watching others get pissed. I am regularly amazed both by the amount of booze people routinely knock back and their total denial about what they’re doing. I know several undeclared alcoholics but have never yet met a Brit who overestimated how much they drank.

“Dry January” says it all. “I haven’t got an alcohol problem,” the temporary abstainer tells himself, “I was dry most of January.” And, having congratulated himself, goes on with immense relief to be “wet” for the other 11 months. According to the annual Global Drugs Survey, the English were among those who were most often noticeably drunk and least remorseful about it.

Actually this goes beyond social acceptance. Most of us who rarely drink to excess have the experience of feeling softly coerced by others. I found a website for a major language school in the West Country where it helpfully informed foreign students of the ten most common English expressions for alcohol abuse, from “sloshed” to “hammered”, explaining that “anybody who comes to the UK soon notices that many British people spend a lot of their free time drinking and getting drunk”.

Last month, during a TV appearance, the Labour MP Dan Carden said he thought that it was harder in Britain than most other nations to “not drink and not get drunk”. Days earlier he had spoken in the Commons about his alcoholism in his twenties and how it had nearly killed him. During that speech he made reference to the little-discussed fact that several MPs and former MPs have drunk themselves to death. None, as far as I know, has died from a drugs overdose.

Carden’s honesty is a hopeful straw in the wind. Another has been the storyline on the BBC radio soap opera The Archers, in which a young middle-class mother has abandoned her child and family because she cannot stop boozing. It’s a habit she picked up from having wine with every meal, associating celebration with alcohol and using drink to deal with stress. The message is clear: this could easily be you.

In England we haven’t renewed our alcohol strategy for nearly a decade. Most of our policy debate has centred around raising the cost of the cheapest booze through “minimum pricing” — adopted already by Scotland and Wales and showing some signs of success. I am in favour of this, though clearly it discriminates against poorer alcoholics; the cocktail drunkards are not so price-susceptible.

It’s obvious that the overwhelming problem here is the culture. Though we’ve driven “illegal” drugs (some of them fairly harmless) underground, turning the trade into mints for gangsters, we have treated the most dangerous drug of all as though it was not just acceptable but desirable. Every time a daytime TV host tells a successful sportsperson “I’ll bet you’ll have a sore head in the morning!” the message lodges somewhere that getting drunk is a great thing to do. Is the only thing to do. Every time you see a poster in a public place in effect advertising drinking to excess, alcohol addiction gets a tiny boost. We need to think about that. Soberly.