Alcohol is killing us … it’s time to show some spirit and fight back

Lent began last Wednesday, an annual opportunity to give up chocolate and to walk to work instead of taking the bus. This year we should forget about the jokey little sacrifices and skip to a big one; if there's one thing Scots could do with giving up permanently it's the booze.

Last weekend, two lads in front of me at the supermarket checkout loaded their trolley full of Buckfast and beers, before boasting to the woman serving them that they were going home to get trolleyed. It was noon.

They aren't the only ones.

Figures released last week by the Office of National Statistics revealed alcohol kills twice as many Scots as the UK average. Between 2002 and 2004, the alcohol-related death rate for Scots men was 39.1 per 100,000 of the population, compared with 17.4 across Britain. The highest alcohol-related death rates are in Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Lothians, and the Western Isles. Scotland has more deaths from cirrhosis of the liver than anywhere else in Europe.

Perhaps most worrying is the fact Scottish women drink more than English men, with all the threats to their health and safety that horrifying fact implies. As last week's terrible story of the 15-year-old who was raped in Paisley while she lay unconscious after a drinking session shows, young girls are susceptible to the effects of drink, and particularly vulnerable when drunk. But it isn't fair to put the blame on the ladettes or the yobs, the problem goes much deeper.

It's worth reflecting on what the statistics mean. Forget the deaths for a moment and think about the human lives soured and spoiled by drink addiction. The months and years of regular, daily stupefaction, the fights, the days off work, the marriages strained or destroyed, the family embarrassed, the children ignored or assaulted. The self-hatred, the sore heads, the laughing off of the hideous night before. The boasting and the vomiting. The sheer human misery caused by Scotland's addiction to the personality altering effects of ethanol.

Health minister Andy Kerr last week relaunched the Executive's plans to cut alcohol consumption in Scotland. The Executive's report was widely ridiculed by health professionals last time around, forcing an extensive rewrite.

Kerr launched his scheme in a Leith convenience store, to fit with the executive's message that drinking is a problem of the under-age and the poor. It's not, of course. The middle classes are as guilty as anyone else of drinking too much, but it is not considered a social ill because they are tanking overpriced cocktails or malt whisky. The executive's big idea is to catch retailers who sell alcohol to under-age drinkers and provide more support for those who develop drink problems.

But when a teenager puts their mind to something they will get it, whether it's a PlayStation 3 or a six-pack of lager.

Teenagers are also good at spotting the mixed messages sent out by adults, and we are sending a confused one.

In 2005 the same Labour Party Kerr belongs to forced through legislation in England to allow councils to issue 24-hour licences. Ignoring the warnings, government minister Hazel Blears invoked a vision of European-style café culture, where adults could go out and enjoy a single glass of wine in the evening without ending up in the gutter.

But the differences in southern European drinking are not to do with how long bars are open: they are to do with a different culture surrounding drink.

In southern Europe no-one stands in a bar sinking pint after pint, except British tourists. Spaniards are more likely to sip a glass of wine with a plate of tapas to hand. Significantly, streets are full of families, elderly couples and young children, even late at night, so they don't become the domain of drunken packs of teenagers. Most striking of all, women hardly drink at all.

Asurvey this month showed that in the past 12 months 53% of publicans had been attacked or intimidated by punters when they refused to serve them because they were drunk. Faced with the inevitable result of the 24-hour drink culture it has unleashed in England, the government is in retreat.

As Tessa Jowell's department discourages councils from granting automatic extensions to opening hours, Blears has blamed Britain's "Anglo-Saxon mentality" for its drinking culture. If the minister thinks Anglo-Saxons have problems, she should meet the Celts.

A child could have foreseen 24-hour drinking was going to be a disaster. But it doesn't follow that prohibition, either by law or taxation, is the answer.

Just look at America, where the drinking age of 21 does nothing to discourage college students from behaving badly. And in Scandinavia, where taxation has priced booze sky high, people get drunk at home before they go out for the night, with a shocking rate of poisoning from homemade hooch.

So what can we do?

Long-term drinkers who have dried out say you need to take one day at a time. In the same spirit let me suggest one change that is achievable.

Regardless of peer pressure, social conventions, pushy drinkers insisting you have another, let us all - men, women, young, old - think twice, three times, before we have another drink.

As F Scott Fitzgerald, whose brilliant life was cut short by the booze, said: "First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man." And drink has taken enough men and women in this small country.

Denial is one of the toughest

Sunday Herald