Under-age drinking: Part 1 - Booze

The Speccie drew my attention to this article in the Independent.

I am 23 and I have to start by confessing that I am one of the last academic years (Sep - Aug) that could get away with under-age drinking in pubs because right after I turned 18 Her Majesty's Government decided that if you didn't look over 21 you had to be ID'd. Phew.

Anyway... to the article. 

Mary Ann Sieghart: No wonder they've got a drink problem

If we had invented a system to encourage young people to drink too much, it would look like the system we have created now

If we were only looking at the headline and the byline then I would say, "Yep, totally" but this is a very wordy article so let's crack on.

Why do younger people binge drink more than their parents? It's not that their lives are so miserable that they have to obliterate their feelings. And it's not just their youth – their parents' generation didn't get routinely plastered at that age. No, it's much more the fault of stricter licensing laws, the demise of the pub and the relative cheapness of alcohol in shops.

This paragraph is 50/50 on accuracy.  My father certainly drank far more than I did at the similar age (I actually went teetotal for two years because I thought that I was becoming too much of a mess), he (and by extension many other family members and family of friends (DEAD ANT)) have told me many stories of drunken escapades, I dread to think about the lack of stories I will have to tell my own children.  So are the children drinking more than the parents?  In my opinion, no, they just aren't being supervised the same way.  As for relative pricing, well that is a major factor and Ms. Sieghart goes into it futher.

When we were teenagers, we started going to the pub from the age of about 14. We had to pretend to be 18, but most landlords didn't ask and the rest gave us a wink but served us anyway. The pub was an institution, a social hub. You wanted to be accepted by the regulars, so you behaved the way they did.

Totally agree, had the same experience and as Ms. Sieghart goes on to say it shapes your drinking habits.

All these things have now changed. In many pubs, landlords are so afraid of losing their licence that they no longer allow parents to take their children in with them, so the children don't grow up learning how to drink, chat and socialise in a civilised fashion. Then, when the children are teenagers, they can't drink alcohol in a pub until they're 18 – or until they look 18 and get a convincing enough fake ID. Even if they have the ID, they can't go unless all their friends have one too. 

 Again, I totally agree.  More stories from family of being shoved to one side in the pub with a bottle of Panda Pop and a packet of Golden Wonder while the parents had their drinks, beer for the gents, fruit based drink for the ladies.

So how do they drink? They buy vodka from the off-licence or supermarket and bring it home. Only one member of the group needs to be old enough to buy it, or one member's big brother or sister. Then, because they're young and have no role models or constraints, they get completely pissed. They drink to get drunk. 

 Vodka, crates of beer, anything you could carry from the local corner shop back to your house and you will be amazed how much and how far a 15 year old can carry beer when they know they can drink it when they get home.

Now we get to the good bit of the article, money.  (I apologise now for the long quote but this is the bit that you really need to read)

The price differential these days also predisposes younger people to drink too much. It's so much more expensive to drink in a pub than to drink at home. So even when teenagers reach 18, they're less likely to start going to their local. Instead, they can buy a 70cl bottle of own-brand basic vodka at a supermarket for just over £8. That's 28 pub measures, while a single vodka-and-tonic in a pub costs more than £3. Do the maths – young people do.

 That's the common sense bit... unfortunately Ms. Sieghart's proposed solution is in my mind a u-turn but we'll get to that later.

Because drink is so expensive in pubs and bars, students say that the incentive is to drink as much as possible at home before you go out. That means you force yourself to get drunk so that the feeling will last for the rest of the evening without the need to top up too much. One of the arguments for liberalising the licensing laws was that some people felt they had to drink all they could before the pubs shut at 11pm. Now younger people are drinking all they can at the start of the evening, which is surely worse.

 To me this is six of one and half dozen of the other.  From my experience the 'pre-drinking' was a precaution because to me most clubs were the definition of dull, the music was rubbish, no place to chat and you had to be totally wankered or extremely comfortable (same thing, no?) to have a good time.

If we had invented a system that encouraged young people to drink too much, it would look like this. Strong spirits would be ridiculously cheap to take home. Bars and clubs would be designed to maximize the amount people drank. And young people would be deterred from entering the one institution that taught them how to drink well rather than badly. 

 Last sentence is spot on in my mind.  Third sentence is slightly misleading, they are meant to make it easy to drink (bar access and stocked drinks) and more enjoyable while intoxicated but they don't force people to drink.  Second sentence to me is something that isn't the issue, I am a free marketeer (so low prices are good) and alcohol has always been cheaper to buy at a shop and take home than drink out.  Finally the first sentence of the above paragraph; I think that we have created a system that has increased the availability of alcohol and legislation has removed the old teaching mechanisms and made it more desirable to 14-17 years olds by telling them that they aren't allowed it.  On a parallel, the number of under 18's that smoke increased after the age to buy cigarettes was raised from 16 to 18.

The irony is that children spend the best part of their childhoods trying to be more adult and when they mimic adults they are scalded for it.

Pubs desperately need a boost. They are closing at a rate of nearly 30 a week. You can blame the smoking ban. You can blame a clampdown on drink-driving. But it can't help that alcohol has become so much cheaper to buy from shops, and – as a result – that young people aren't frequenting pubs. 

 I do blame the smoking ban but more fundamentally I blame the lack of trust in Landlords and Landladies across the country.  Their pubs are their homes and places of business yet they aren't allowed to decide what happens there, as Ms. Sieghart points out, under-age drinking was only allowed with the landlord's consent.

For centuries, the pub, tavern or inn has been the drinking place of choice for Britons. Even the French Prime Minister, François Fillon, expressed his envy of them last week. They are wonderful institutions – at their best, they are convivial, friendly, sociable and unifying. They bring people together of all ages and classes. They introduce neighbours to each other and foster a sense of community. 

 It says something about the people when the centre of the community in the US is the church and in the British Isles it is the pub.

The Government is looking at ways to help local people buy their pub if it's in danger of closing down. But perhaps ministers should also look at raising excise duty on off-sales and cutting it for drink bought in pubs. For anything that encourages a culture of happy social drinking rather than hideous binge drinking would be good for society, good for our young people's livers and good for our town centres. Let's hope it's not too late.

 This is where I get all libertarian and say "Why not let the license owners decide what happens in their pubs?" and "Raising a tax (because duty is just a tax in sheep's clothing) has never solved a problem while reducing taxes has solved problems, so let's slash duty all round".  You are never going to get rid of binge drinkers but the least we could do is revert to the old ways of the landlord chucking them out or them spending the night in a cell until they have slept it off.

Mary Ann Sieghart tweets as @MASieghart or go to her website.

Dick Puddlecote beat me to it with his post.

Part 2 will be about "da'youth and other drugs".