PROTZ
A load of 'Horlicks'
I went to the pub and found people
enjoying alcohol. They weren't sniffing it, injecting it or smoking it. They were drinking it, perfectly legally.
It was a world away from the pontificating nonsense spouted by a team of "experts", including several leading professors, who said a couple of weeks ago that alcohol should be reclassified as a drug as harmful as heroin or cocaine.
As they say in polite circles, what a load of Horlicks. Alcohol dates back to at least 3,000 years BC. It is a civilising drink. Until comparatively recently, only alcohol gave cheer and comfort to people and kept them healthy. For centuries, until water was safe to drink, alcohol was the only safe beverage and was also rich in vitamins essential for a good diet and a long life.
In the past few weeks I have visited the Wye Valley Brewery near Hereford, Slater's in Stafford and mighty Everards in Leicester. In all three cases, brewing was going on in the open. There were no police cars patrolling the area, looking for dangerous drugs.
The people carrying out the brewing processes are skilled men and women. Some of them have degrees in science or have been trained at the School of Brewing & Distilling in Edinburgh, part of the university.
I left school at 16 and went to work but as far as I know universities tend not to run degree courses in the manufacture of dangerous drugs. There are many micro-breweries based in small buildings. But they are a world removed from the back-street lockups where poppies are turned into dope or the secret laboratories where crude chemicals are boiled and distilled to make even more lethal hard drugs.
Alan Eames, a celebrated American beer writer, died in February. As well as a love for the subject, he was also an anthropologist and he spent years researching the roots of brewing.
His travels took him to the Amazon jungle and also to Egypt where he translated hieroglyphics that revealed how beer was made in the Old World.
It is thanks to Eames that we know that a Sumerian poet, writing around the year 3,000 BC, said, "I feel wonderful, drinking beer in a blissful mood, with joy in my heart and a happy liver."
Eames developed a theory, with which many Egyptologists agree, that beer, even more than bread, played a key role in creating settled, civilised societies. He wrote: "Protected by alcohol, beer had a palatability lasting far longer than any other food stuff. A vitamin-rich porridge, daily beer drinking increased both health and longevity, reducing diseases and malnutrition.
"10,000 years ago, barley was domesticated and worshipped as a god in the highlands of the southern Levant. Thus was beer the driving force that led nomadic mankind into village life."
In South America, Eames discovered - after making long and hazardous journeys - that the Aztecs and Mayan people also made a life-enhancing alcohol from grain, long before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.
In other words, beer and other forms of alcohol have some history on their side. Alcohol is locked deep in the story of our planet and has made a massive contribution to civilisation and culture.
For learned people to suggest that alcohol is as lethal as hard drugs deserves a loud raspberry. Around 98% of British people handle alcohol perfectly sensibly. A few drinks a day will not only do you no harm but can be mildly beneficial.
Beer and red wine in particular are packed with vitamins and antioxidants that are good for the health and can help prevent heart disease and cancer. I am not aware of any evidence that suggests cocaine, heroin, opium or even cannabis are similarly beneficial.
The activities of a tiny handful of idiots in town centres at weekend should not distract us from the pleasures of beer, wine and whisky. Unwinding at lunchtime or after a hard day's work with a glass of the finest is one of life's great joys. Professors who argue otherwise have never partaken of a pint of Old Frothblower.
They can stick to their late-night Horlicks but they shouldn't turn our daily pleasure into a banned drug.
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