Problem drinking a self-fulfilling prophecy?

During a 45,000-mile pub-crawl for his new book, beer writer Pete Brown discovered that it's our culture not suppliers and licensees that is to blame for problem drinking

A few months ago I spent a Friday night drinking in Barnsley, the self-proclaimed Maggaluf of Yorkshire. I was with a young local journalist and one of his mates, who go out drinking two or three times a week. I asked a few of my friends who still live locally if they wanted to join us. Their reactions ranged from 'I hear it can get pretty rough to 'you must be joking.

Perhaps this was prompted by a recent binge-drinking special on local TV that focused on Barnsley, showing the rowdy scenes that have become a permanent ratings hit. Or maybe it was because, a few months earlier, a judge had remarked that our town centres were now no-go zones for normal people, populated by 'urban savages. Whatever, I was getting pretty nervous about going out myself.

So I was somewhat surprised when, on my binge-drinking session, I saw not one fight, not one person crying, not one person getting angry. Not one girl flashed her boobs at me. I did see twenty or thirty thousand people singing, dancing, laughing, chatting and snogging. The question that has perplexed me ever since is this: in what way were these denizens of a supposed no-go area not normal?

Agenda dictated by neo-puritans

I wouldn't say our drinking culture is in perfect health. The nasty cocktails being pushed aggressively in some of Barnsley's pubs demonstrate a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol among drinkers and a moral vacuity on the part of the sellers but the agenda on the binge-drinking issue is being increasingly dictated by neo- puritans who have no idea what goes on in our town centres on a Friday night, because they would never dream of going there themselves.

I've spent the past year studying drinking culture around the world for a new book. The practical side a 45,000-mile pub-crawl was the best time of my life.

It reminded me that drinking is above all a social activity, not an anti-social one. A lifetime's work by anthropologist Dwight Heath, and 50 years' worth of research collected by Oxford's Social Issues Research Centre, overwhelmingly endorse this. The Aztecs used to refer to pulque, the beer they drank, as centzonttotochtli, which means 'four hundred rabbits, referring to its almost infinite variety of effects on those who drank it.

In countries such as the UK, the connection between alcohol and anti-social behaviour is stressed so often we believe the most common 'rabbits make drinkers more violent or more sexually permissive, that there is a causal link. In fact, by far the most common effects are relaxation and heightened sociability. Having a few drinks is a good thing. Responsible drinking is not the same as not drinking enough to feel any effect.

Hysterical approach to the issue

It has become almost forbidden to mention the pleasures of alcohol. Every society in the history of civilisation has drunk to enable increased sociability. It's entirely natural. While we should never miss an opportunity to educate people as to the gastronomic delights of various drinks, we're not going to connect with drinkers unless we can acknowledge the main reason they drink. The fact that the latest advertising regulations forbid any implication that drinking enhances social situations shows just how hysterical approaches to the issue have become.

There was one particularly revealing difference between Britain and the other countries I visited. While most places embrace the effects of alcohol, they draw a sharp distinction between drinking enough to loosen up and relax, and drinking so much that they start to lose control. In the English language we have upwards of 2,000 words for being drunk, most of them hinting at oblivion or destruction. The Danes and the Spanish have many more words for that middle state, best translated as 'buzzed. They will drink to this state two or three times a week, but claim to have been drunk only two or three times in their lives. Buzzed is a separate stage between sober and drunk an end in itself rather than a stage on the journey to oblivion.

For most people, the number of drinks currently classified as a binge would include buzzed occasions as well as drunk occasions. This is partly because it makes no allowance for how long the session is, how much or how often the person normally drinks, and whether the person is eating, or drinking water as well as alcohol. (Interestingly, there is no consensus among medical experts as to the amount that is considered unhealthy in one session.) But there also seems to be something in our culture that regards it as a sign of weakness that so many of us use a drug in this way.

Alcohol brings to the surface what is already there. If we are violent drunks, it's not alcohol that is to blame, but something else in our culture. If we acknowledge this, we have to ask ourselves some hard questions about our society. It's much easier to blame the booze.

Opposition to longer hours

And so we get the moral opposition to longer licensing hours, even though every shred of independent research demonstrates emphatically that there is no correlation whatsoever between the availability of alcohol and people's propensity to drink to excess. The biggest correlation with excessive drunkenness is with a country's attitude to drink: where it is treated as a problem, people come to regard it as such. Where the state has a relaxed attitude to alcohol, people are less likely to form a dysfunctional relationship with it.

Look at Australia. Forty years ago pubs closed at six o'clock, and people drank themselves stupid at last orders, spilling into the streets to create chaos. Pubs now open till 2am. While the Aussies still share our fondness for drink, there is far less anti-social behaviour than there was under the old laws, or than there still is in the UK.

The more we treat drinkers like criminals, the greater the likelihood that they will be. Imagine sitting outside a pub on a sunny Sunday afternoon, having two or three pints. Imagine your mood. Now imagine there is a line of policemen standing in front you, not intervening yet but making their presence felt. Imagine your mood now. When we make young drinkers feel that what they are doing is wrong, that they shouldn't be doing it, the more we encourage them to say 'f*** you, I deserve this, it's my right to get hammered, and anyway what are you going to do about it?

Editorial sleight-of-hand

The growing media focus on this problem, for example, with TV programmes following the police around on a Friday night, only makes it worse. If you're with the police, then you're going to see the worst of whatever happens. But through editorial sleight-of-hand, the experience of the police and the experience of an average punter become confused. So 'normal people feel less encouraged to go out, and the anti-social element increasingly sees this behaviour as the norm, as what is expected of them.

In the programme about Barnsley, the reporter in the back of the police van said: 'It's a quarter to midnight, and we're just getting our first reports of trouble. She seemed to think this confirmed how terrible things were. She didn't comment on the obvious corollary of this that tens of thousands of people had been drinking peacefully for hours with no reports of trouble until the pubs started closing.

The alcohol industry does need to take responsibility for problem drinking. It's right that we are seen to take steps to prevent promotions that encourage drunkenness for its own sake. But it's vital that at the same time, the industry takes a stand against misinformation and hysteria. It seems as though we are scared to defend ourselves, scared of arguing the case for drinking. Unless we respond firmly to unfair criticism, we will find ourselves walked all over by people who are not actually interested in sustaining a healthy drinking culture, and problem drinking will, paradoxically, only get worse.