Our booze blues

We know it brings chaos to our city streets, we know it destroys families, we know it's responsible for violence and domestic abuse, we know it's killing us, so why do we still love to drink?

There are certain cherished sayings we could probably live without. And by "live" I mean exactly that. Here's one redolent, supposedly, of the Scottish national character: Freedom and whisky gang thegither. What's wrong with that sentiment? Perhaps the fact that it is only slightly less egregious, muddled and downright dangerous than asserting that alcopops and human dignity combine nicely.

We shouldn't pick on the water of life, of course. In fact, amid all the sincere concern over Scotland's alcohol addiction you will not find a politician prepared to associate our best-known hooch with the problem. Where whisky is concerned, a special exemption applies. The stuff is imbibed, apparently, solely by connoisseurs who merely savour its infinite nuances. And I'll have what they're drinking.

This oddity arises, no doubt, from the notion, odder still, of a national drink. How could you possess such a trophy if no-one touched a drop? If you seek explanations for the Scots and sottishness, that's a place to start. Whisky may not be fashionable, particularly among the young, but its status has helped to make suicidal drinking almost compulsory. Having a national poet best known for his "carousing" probably doesn't help either. The fact that whisky is also one of our chief exports is the clincher, politically speaking.
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Hence the line from the SNP government: excessive consumption rather than drink itself is the issue. Cheap drink is deplored but pride is taken in the matchless liquid gold distilled by the whisky industry. So we have another oddity: Scotland is enjoined to moderate its consumption while continuing to flourish as a major booze producer. Hard liquor is, like it or not, part of our national identity.

Anecdotally at least, it remains a minor part of a major public health crisis. That isn't really the point. Deprecate Buckfast if you like - the deprecating goes more easily if you taste the stuff - and deplore lager cheaper than water. But there is no essential difference between a fine malt and a can of super-strength fizz. Their function, despite all the learned talk of peat in the water or the infinite depths of rare old claret, is everywhere apparent. It explains why alcohol is problematic: people drink to get drunk.

True, there are social drinkers. There are, always, people of moderate habits who can enjoy a single glass just for the taste, people who will take the odd drink and never allow themselves to get drunk. They have a hard time of it, as often as not. Sobriety makes boozers uncomfortable. But the boozers have a point: what is the point, exactly, of consuming an intoxicant and avoiding intoxication?

It's fun. It strips away the miserable inhibitions life has bequeathed. It instils confidence. It makes the world seem a brighter place. It's that song from Cheers: "Wouldn't you like to get away?" Who wouldn't? But then, if sufficiently dedicated, you discover that the politicians are mistaken: there is no such thing as cheap booze. It shares a characteristic with tobacco. As addicts sometimes observe, there is absolutely nothing wrong with smoking - aside from the fact that it kills you. One way or another, drink costs.

According to the government, it is costing Scotland close to £2.5 billion a year. The number of alcohol deaths has doubled in a decade. According to one calculation, we - this is not being written by an abstainer - put away enough annually to render every adult in Scotland permanently over the safe limit. And not every Scot is a drinker. It just seems that way.

The problem is not new, but it is manifesting itself in new ways. Older readers can probably remember the liberalisation, so called, of licensing hours. The argument ran that if only we were freed from the pressure of last orders we wouldn't drink so frantically. In fact, we would discover the delights of café society. Civilised drinking, they called it. That went well, don't you think?

The politicians, as is the fashion, are putting their faith in the price mechanism. They have a point, up to a point. Alcohol is as cheap as it has been since the Scots Parliament first slapped a tax on whisky in 1644. In relative terms, the price of an unremarkable bottle of spirits has been falling for a decade and more. Quantities once only seen in a pub gantry, a litre and more, are on every supermarket shelf. And lest you fail to get the message, that modest half bottle will cost you much more, measure for measure, than its bigger brothers. Might as well just get the litre, eh?

So responsible politicians propose responsible measures. Last week's "pre-legislative consultation document" from the government found merit, for example, in minimum pricing. Forcing retailers to charge at least 35p per unit of alcohol would drive up the cost of most, though not all, brands. Medical opinion is enthused. Doctors are convinced by evidence suggesting that if drink is dearer people will drink less. I remain to be convinced.

I am not much impressed, either, by the idea of "alcohol-only" checkouts in supermarkets and the so-called "walk of shame". Apparently, drinkers will be deterred by the mere thought of being observed by the neighbours as they lug their gallons to the till. My guess is that such a till would be precisely the place where most people would meet those neighbours.

Drinking is ingrained. If the price goes up - Buckfast would be unaffected, amazingly enough - alternatives would be found. Smuggling, booze cruises, and illicit production would become national pastimes. Russia's example is relevant. They, too, have a national drink and a national problem. But at the heart of that problem, slaughtering a generation, is bootleg vodka produced by criminal gangs. When it comes to keeping the customer satisfied, I suspect our supermarket chains are at least as ingenious as the Russian mafia.

Then we have the notion that the age for buying drink from off-licences should be raised from 18 to 21. Some Scandinavian countries and certain American states have adopted this approach. No-one outside the alcohol industry seems to think, first, that such an approach would involve a real injustice. Do we really propose to allow 18-year-olds the chance to die in Helmand province while criminalising them if they step into Oddbins?

Besides, we already have enough of a problem, I would have thought, with underage drinking. A study by the World Health Organisation (WHO), released last week, found that teenagers in Britain (not just in Scotland) are more likely to be drinking regularly at 15 than their contemporaries in other western countries. Would raising the age limit make any difference? I don't see how.

Give the Edinburgh government this much credit: we are in new territory. Scotland's relationship with alcohol has always been unhealthy. It now seems to verge on the psychotic. Glasgow's Renfield Street on Saturday night is no place for those of a nervous disposition, but every town in Scotland, and many villages, has its vomit-spattered battlezones. Everyone knows it.

Everyone knows, too, that booze is no longer just a blight on the less-well-off, the socially maladjusted, and the addictive personality. Students always drank, but these days, it seems, the weekend binge (for starters) is part and parcel of the university experience. Teenagers, many of them, always "experimented" with the contents of the family drink cupboard. Today, as WHO attests, the experimental phase is brief indeed. If the drink trade knows nothing else, it knows where its next customers are coming from.

Then there are respectable folk, the middle-class types, the ones whose knowledge and appreciation of wine has altered the booze landscape. The grape, you will remember, was another of those European novelties that was supposed to civilise us. Judging by sales, the home-drinking classes who never vandalise, never brawl, and never throw up in the street are civilising themselves into unconsciousness. They can rationalise the habit, too: many pubs are grim affairs. Pub prices, meanwhile, cannot compete with supermarket offers.

One feature of all this is tricky. Women drinkers are one notable new fact in the wonderful world of addiction. You could say that's as it should be. The days when women entering pubs without men were frowned upon - assumptions as to their profession were made - are best consigned to the past. Women expect equal treatment. But equality of distress, desperation and physical decay? Apparently so. Drunken girls and women are now commonplace - as, increasingly, are women with wrecked livers.

None of this is news. But it leaves us with the obvious question: why the Scots? The Welsh and the Irish have a certain reputation; parts of England have established booze cultures. But only of Scotland can it be said confidently that a serious problem is growing steadily, inexorably worse. It is as though self-destruction is being sought almost as a matter of honour. Why?

If I had a quick answer I would be writing to Alex Salmond, not writing for this newspaper. Decades of abuse and centuries of black humour celebrating stupidity have led us to this. A national compulsion wedded to a national bravado has guaranteed the catastrophe. The falling real cost of alcohol has merely completed the cocktail.

Many people drink, they say, for the illusion of confidence. This suggests that, as a community, our confidence is in poor shape. Others will tell you that they drink to keep boredom and worries at bay. We must, I think, be afflicted with a lot of both. Doctors will add the fact that alcohol is a depressant, and that those so depressed self-medicate in the mistaken belief that a bit of cheer will cure them. This suggests that we are a depressed bunch busy making ourselves still more depressed.

The simple truth, I think, is that many Scots recognise only one alcohol problem: that's when there's no alcohol available. They are raised in a booze-soaked culture that celebrates its own folly and regards abstinence as the habit of the sad and strange. It memorialises its national poet annually with p*ss-ups to celebrate a writer's fondness for getting p*ssed. It treats the arrival of each New Year as an injunction to get extra-drunk. It regards births, marriages and deaths as moments for which alcohol is obligatory.

And it likes being drunk. There is a difference between the problem drinker and the alcoholic. The former still has a choice, of sorts. Most Scots, and the young in particular, occupy that category. They choose booze, it seems, because booze is what makes life in Scotland bearable. Ponder that, for a moment.

Tell them, as the government has, that they are to be deterred from risky behaviour and a question will hang in the air. This: what are we supposed to do instead? Large numbers of Scots are incapable, so to speak, of arriving at an answer. A cliché holds true, nevertheless: hard drinking is a symptom. It becomes a cause, in time, of all sorts of misery, but the fact remains that when many Scots contemplate their world they reach for the bottle.

The stoicism once taught by our religions no longer applies. Notions of self-respect no longer inhibit. Instant gratification is available on every supermarket shelf. And booze, at least for a while, at least until family breakdown, psychosis and organ failure make their claims, answers every question. At bargain prices, too.