MMost people can vaguely remember where they were when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000. I? I hugged the jaundiced edge of a village hall toilet and vomited ten shades of bile. I had been trying to complete Team 2000 – a challenge set by twenty friends who attempted to consume 2,000 units of alcohol, 100 units each, in December.
Seasoned connoisseurs would consider this eminently feasible – especially around the holidays – but I was only 15 years old. Later that evening, in the grim morning, I passed out and defecated in my boyfriend’s sleeping bag. Welcome to generation peak drink.
‘Peak booze’ was a nickname dropped in 2004 and became popular over a number of years Article from 2015 by author Chrissie Giles. British drinking rates that year reached a century high: 9.5 liters of pure alcohol, the equivalent of around 100 bottles of wine, per person per year. (In 1950 this was only 3.9 liters.)
I was in college at the time, gleefully drinking the booze that had been ingrained into the fabric of every social event since my teenage years. Fast forward to last week, and government statistics showed that the number of alcohol-related deaths in Britain exceeded the 10,000 mark for the first time in a year (in 2022). That was an increase of 32.8% on 2019, with most media coverage focusing on the impact of Covid.
But what about peak booze? How did we reach this lodestar of excesses – and how much blame should he bear for these often untimely deaths?
If 2004 was the height of the drinking boom, we can roughly describe the era as the mid-1990s. Writer James Butler recently called this period an era of “ironic, nihilist, hyper-sadistic mass culture” and, looking back, it’s possible to empathize with that. We certainly drank—often in addition to using cocaine, whose use roughly tripled in this decade compared to 1995—with a “don’t care” attitude that permeated the cultural totems of the time.
The most obvious of these are the Libertines – the generational, fashion-defining punk poets who straddled the intersection of culture and class. Their appeal to everyone was sealed by their zeal for alcohol (and many illegal drugs). Never has being wasted seemed so ambitious or romanticized – but also normal. This attitude permeated a multi-genre – if not wildly multi-ethnic – music scene for which booze was the best: acts like The Strokes, the Streets, Klaxons, LCD Soundsystem, Bloc Party, CSS, Hard-Fi and Amy Winehouse – whose vulnerabilities were shamelessly mined by the tabloids until her tragic death from alcohol intoxication in 2011. And it wasn’t just music: TV shows like Hides And Shamelessthe latter with its infamous but sympathetic protagonist Frank Gallagher, praising booze and excess in their own way.
The devil, as always, is in the details. This was a decade that began metaphorically with September 11 – which sent society’s collective paranoia levels into a spiral – and New Labor was re-elected to power on the promise that it “will not introduce and legislate (university) top-up fees has introduced against. ”. They had abandoned this in 2004 – a year after starting a war in Iraq, justified by the infamous ‘unreliable dossier’. The party languished, and in 2008 a global recession began in the wake of the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, damaging employment prospects and making additional compensation take even longer to be repaid. It’s perhaps no wonder that people, especially young people, seek escapism.
In 2008 Swimming with crocodiles: the culture of extreme drinking, criminologist and researcher in the field of drug culture Fiona Measham suggests: “Young people growing up in contemporary late modern capitalist society (try to) balance a broader sense of lack of control with the reassertion of control through the ‘controlled loss of control’ in leisure” as means to negotiate the pressures of everyday life.
Measham also discusses how the night-time economy became an engine for a civic revival. This was manna for those who enjoyed a pint or eight, but also created a “growing range of licensed leisure venues that made drinking the primary purpose rather than the backdrop for creating social spaces”. This culture of intoxication was aided by the famous Licensing Act 2003, which relaxed licensing times in an attempt to inspire a so-called ‘Mediterranean’ alcohol culture. While relatively few venues applied for the 24-hour licenses offered when the new laws came into effect in November 2005, more than 50,000 venues were granted extended opening hours on 1 April 2006.
This all happened in the wake of the 1990s and Britpop’s deification of ‘cigarettes and alcohol’ plus rave culture – which was amplified by drug ecstasy. It is a pleasure-inducing stimulant that is not suitable for reducing Stella Artois. The drug was demonized by the media in the wake of Leah Betts’ death in 1995 and, according to Measham and fellow researcher Kevin Brain, led brewers to use alcopops and later other drinkable beverages containing ingredients like guarana and caffeine as a more attractive, gendered -comprehensive psychoactive alternative.
The rise of wine also had a huge impact on alcohol consumption among women, bringing with it cultural shifts that are taking us through the booze’s peak to the current crisis.
“You can see a rise in alcohol consumption among women, which is a perfect reflection of overall wine consumption,” says Colin Angus, a senior research fellow at the University of Sheffield with a specialty in alcohol policy modelling. “It also means we no longer drink in pubs: thirty years ago more than two-thirds of alcohol was consumed in pubs. Before the pandemic, more than two-thirds were drunk at home.” (Angus later tells me that the 2022 statistics put this figure at 73%.)
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Research has shown that home drinkers pour too much wine and spirits. Ian Hamilton, associate professor of addiction at the University of York, thinks the pandemic has made solo home drinking much more socially acceptable: “Some of the shame around the idea of the lone drinker has been lost,” he says.
Proof of this is 38-year-old Emma, who underwent a successful liver transplant last year after being diagnosed with stage 4 liver disease. Emma is a patient advocate for the British Liver Trust and says: “I was a social person, a social drinker.”
Her drinking journey started with alcopops when she was about 17, progressed through the cheap cider gears in college, and then forged a career in the grapevine. “I was just drinking wine from my twenties. Always wine. It escalated when I moved to London – the after-work drinking culture was still very much there.” She describes networking breakfasts with prosecco and orange juice, weekend getaways and fun-sounding drunken brunches with the girls. She also says: “the media certainly played a role – there was that programme Ladette for lady. But I also grew up with the Spice Girls and girl power. Drinking was about independence – not only can we join the men, but we can do better.” It was during lockdown that things started to unravel and she was drinking three bottles a day at home, alone.
Emma’s story, although it has a positive conclusion, is unfortunately not unique. The largest escalation in alcohol-related deaths – mainly from liver disease – since the pandemic occurred among women aged 50 to 54. There has been a jump of 48%, from 17.8 people per 100,000 to 26.3. However, these figures are still dwarfed by the number of deaths among men, which are roughly double those among women – the majority among those over 50.
Talk to anyone involved in alcohol policy and it is clear that drinking habits are diabolical to predict and deconstruct: recently released statistics from the World Health Organization, which showed that British children are the world’s biggest alcohol users, went against the prevailing narrative of young people. people who embrace sobriety. But as with most things, the rising number of deaths has its roots in a constellation of socioeconomic inequality, a lack of services and/or adequate health care, plus poor public reporting that may or may not be related to the financial power of big alcohol . But what about peak booze?
“These things rely on a core group that consumes the lion’s share of alcohol,” Hamilton says. “It’s usually not the people who drink a beer or a glass of wine. But (current figures) show the time difference between drinking too much and paying with your life.”
