Alcohol

A certain amount of amnesia is required if you are to believe everything the ‘public health’ lobby tells you. Alcohol is frequently in the media but the only story relating to drink that is genuinely newsworthy is the steep decline in drinking that has occurred in the last decade. Britain has been witnessing its biggest fall in alcohol consumption since the 1930s. This trend was ignored for a long time, but once it became clear that it was not a statistical blip the truth began to seep out. The BBC, which has never seen an anti-alcohol press release it doesn’t like, asked in 2011: ‘Why is alcohol consumption falling?

Stanley Cohen, the legendary criminologist and author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, once commented on 'the unique dilemma of the moral entrepreneur who has to defend the success of his methods and at the same time contend that the problem is getting worse'. The eager activist cannot afford to solve the problem he is paid to tackle – but nor can his methods be seen to fail too blatantly. One problem that is manifestly not getting worse in Britain is violent crime. Every measure of violent crime has been in retreat almost continuously for 20 years. This is a dilemma for those who fretted about the effects of so-called '24 hour drinking' and it is a challenge to those who continue to fret about the 'pocket-money prices' at which alcohol is supposedly sold.

Cocaine addiction is a dreadful thing. I've seen it so many times: bright, once-pretty people with washed-out grey faces who can't think about anything else. Children, partners, careers – they can all go hang so long as the restaurant has a loo where you can do a quick line between courses, or you can nip outside to suck on a crack pipe. This how frantic it can get: If anyone has stopped to watch me go to the cash machine and withdraw stacks of bills, several times because of the $200 transaction limit, then head out to an idling van with tinted windows, and return minutes later with bulging pockets, it wouldn't take much imagination to understand what had just transpired.

For hardened drinkers, looking for the perfect hangover cure is like the search for the fountain of youth. To drink and drink without any consequences is the stuff of fantasy – and it’s one that’s been indulged by countless civilisations. A return to one’s GCSE classics days proves it. It’s nice to know what Grumio really got up to in that culina when he wasn’t coquebatting. For the ancients, getting drunk was a sign of civilisation, proof of masculine virtue and bloody good fun.

The gulf in understanding between the old and the young has widened with the news that the young are beginning to turn teetotal. If there was one thing that the old thought they knew about the young, it was that they drank too much. British youth led the world in its enthusiasm for alcohol. Our cities swarmed with loutish binge drinkers. Yet now, all of a sudden, we learn that abstinence is becoming fashionable. The number of people under 25 who don’t touch a drop has increased by 40 per cent in eight years. More than a quarter of people in this age group now don’t drink anything at all. What is going on? The conditions for heavy drinking would seem to be perfect: there is economic hardship and a generally gloomy outlook on most fronts.

In the last few years alcohol has become the leading cause of death in men under 50 years of age, and it will soon achieve a similar deadly status in women. Alcohol-induced liver deaths have quadrupled in the past 40 years whereas deaths from heart and lung disease have halved. The reasons for this are well established - alcohol is cheaper and more easily available than it has been since the gin-epidemic of the 1700s and half of all 15-16 year olds are becoming dangerously intoxicated at least once a month. A 21 year woman was recently given a liver transplant for cirrhosis induced by her having essentially an alcohol-only diet since aged ten. Alcohol misuse costs the UK about £30 billion per year of which about £3.

Have you renounced alcohol for the first month of the year after a festive binge? Maybe you’re doing it for charity or for the sake of your liver. But is it worth the sacrifice? Bear in mind: 1. You’ll probably drink more at the end of it. Doctors agree that there’s no point in going on the wagon for a month just to hit the bottle with a vengeance on 1 February and keep boozing for the rest of the year. But, feeling all virtuous and cleansed after your dry month, that’s exactly what you’re likely to do. 2. There’s no proof it does you any good. While not drinking for 31 days certainly won’t do you any harm, there isn’t exactly a body of evidence to show that it has any benefits.

The recent case reported in the press of a 17 year old mother who deliberately binge drank alcohol during her pregnancy, resulting in a baby with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and who now stands accused of administering a 'noxious substance' to the baby and criminal negligence, represents the beginning of what may subsequently morph into the repudiation of some of the rights women have achieved in the last two centuries. FAS occurs in 1 in 3000 births and is characterised by growth deficiency, facial abnormalities and impaired cognition. Adult complications involve psychiatric issues, drug addiction and cognitive deficits. Financial societal costs of FAS are over $300 million dollars in the US alone. It is irreversible and caused by heavy, frequent alcohol consumption in pregnancy.

When the White Queen told Alice she had sometimes believed as many as six contradictory things before breakfast, she spoke for us all. But our irrationality goes further than a simple after-the-event report. Even while we’re believing it, we can know that something we’re believing contradicts something else we believe. Take, in my case, addiction. I believe that addicts lack self-discipline and willpower. Yet I know that this cannot really be the explanation. I feel a faint but ineradicable disapproval of people who can’t stop eating, smoking, drinking or injecting themselves with heroin, while knowing that this reaction is not only harsh, but must be ignorant.

The Pulse is the Spectator's answer to media nonsense about health. Tom Chivers looks past the headlines and all the conflicting advice about health in the news to find out what is true, and what you need to know to stay healthy.  We all know, by now, the rule that if the headline is a question, the answer is probably no. ('Was the Mona Lisa painted by aliens?', 'Are immigrants eating YOUR begonias?', etc.) I wish to propose a corollary to that rule: if the headline begins 'Could red wine help…', the answer is definitely no. Usually the end of the sentence is 'cure cancer', or 'prevent heart disease'. But this time, it's 'Could red wine help improve your skin?'.

University terms are getting started and this year’s Freshers may be glad to read that The Spectator has always staunchly supported the right to get drunk. In the late 19th century, the magazine took issue with the Permissive Bill, which would allow individual parishes to vote on whether or not to ban the liquor trade. ‘Unless the swallowing of alcohol is a mania in se, a positive offence against morals, then the advocates of the Permissive Bill have no logical standing at all, are simply trying to enable the majority to oppress the minority into acting on the majority's opinion in a matter of indifference.

When Mary Jane Mowat remarked recently that rape conviction statistics would not improve ‘until women stop getting so drunk,’ the retired Crown Court judge knew there would be a row. It followed. The judge, knowing that only 60 per cent of rape charges that reach court end in conviction, was making a narrow point. There are big evidential difficulties in pitting the claimed recollection of someone who says she was too drunk to know what she was doing against the claimed recollection of someone who plainly wasn’t. But the row spread wider, as it keeps doing, into the moral status of taking advantage of an inebriated woman.

Q. At a drinks or a dinner party, when very attentive waiters are hovering, I tend to let them keep topping my glass up since the alternative — continuing to say ‘no thank you’ — is so disruptive of conversation. However, my wife tells me that other men clearly manage to find a way of keeping track of how much they have had since other men don’t seem to get as legless as I do. What do you suggest, Mary? — R.B., Exeter A. Have 20 coins in your right-hand pocket. Each time the waiter fills you up, mark his input by discreetly transferring one coin into your left hand pocket. Assuming that a waiter refills no more than a third of a glass at a time, by the time you can feel ten coins in your left-hand pocket, you’ll be ready to switch to water.