Blogger Jude Hunter examines Scotland’s attitude towards alcohol and questions where the line between sensible drinking and a problem is
HERE’S to alcohol: the cause of, and answer to, all life’s problems
– Matt Groening
First a toast. To some of those favourite drinks: a cold pint of beer after a long hill walk. A glass of champagne at a celebration, or a whisky by a fire on a winter’s evening. A glass of wine after a particularly crap day at work. Or the joys of discovering weird and wonderful drinks on holiday, when normal drinking rules do not apply.
In western culture, we love those drinks. In Scotland we love them even more and we are famed for it. At least two of them are keystones of our traditional culture and now the regular drinking of wine is commonplace in modern life.
All of our important dates and rituals, our celebrations of life and death, are marked with the consumption of alcohol, as they were with our ancestors.
All of our important dates and rituals, our celebrations of life and death, are marked with the consumption of alcohol, as they were with our ancestors. At least, that is, in the majority white culture; in minority ethnic communities, alcohol is less prevalent.
It’s a love that is possibly bordering on the obsessive. And it’s unrequited. Alcohol doesn’t love us back. It’s ruining our health, and wreaking violence in our homes and communities. It takes young lives, without a whisker of the publicity received by drug deaths.
Our love for it, combined in many cases with poverty and poor diet, is killing us, years ahead of our time. This is not how a healthy relationship looks.
Of course, this is not a secret, or a startling revelation. The first sentence on the Scottish Government webpage on alcohol reads: “It is becoming increasingly evident that as a nation our relationship with alcohol has become unbalanced.”
You might argue that it always has been, but back in the old days, they didn’t have two litre bottles of White Zoomer cider for PS2.99 on every cheap neighbourhood off licence shelf. The government action framework for alcohol was published in 2009 and included education, early intervention and various public health measures.
It also included the proposal for a minimum price per unit for alcohol, which would primarily target the cheap, high strength beer and cider market. A minimum price act was passed in the Scottish Parliament in 2012, but has still not been implemented due to a legal challenge by the Scotch Whisky Association.
In Glasgow, the impacts on health, mortality, violence and disorder are more severe than elsewhere in Scotland. A briefing report from 2014 by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, Exploring Alcohol Related Harm In Glasgow, highlights some of the most recent data around alcohol-related mortality. While there were large increases in the number of deaths in the late 1990s, these have gradually started to drop again, despite another growth in the early 2000s.
Our love for alcohol, combined in many cases with poverty and poor diet, is killing us, years ahead of our time. This is not how a healthy relationship looks.
But there are worrying trends, such as the increase in the alcohol-related deaths of young women aged 16-44, and of this group, the highest risk is to those born in the 1970s, such as myself.
So why us? We grew up in a world where regular drinking was normal. Men went out to pubs in the evening after tea; if they were more affluent, they might go to their sport club of choice and have a drink in the bar there.
In the early days, when the kids were young, the mums drank tea and fell asleep in front of the TV of an evening. By the time we were growing up a bit, it was the beginning of the era of decent, cheap wine in supermarkets. Then there would always be some at home: mother’s little helper.
Some of us will enjoy reaching for a glass ourselves following a tough day at work and often stressful bustle of post school feeding and homework routine. And then there were those weekend nights we grew up with: the boozy, smoky evenings with friends, in each other’s homes which lasted until the wee small hours.
If it was in our house, we would creep down the stairs and try and keek in to see what was going on. Too young to understand the conversations, the atmosphere was usually loud, fun and no doubt a bit flirty. Some of us will have experienced those kinds of evenings ourselves, that end with old songs being played, stories being told, dancing and the misguided opening of a bottle of something green coloured from Greece, simply because it’s the only booze left in the house.
These are fun times, until the hangover kicks in the next day. And the hangover may be the least of our worries. The trouble with alcohol is the long term effect on our health and the slow creep of addiction, only discovered when it’s too late.
The hangover may be the least of our worries. The trouble with alcohol is the long term effect on our health and the slow creep of addiction, only discovered when it’s too late.
There may be a drop in the number of officially recorded alcohol deaths, but that doesn’t take into account the other diseases where alcohol may be a hidden, but strong causal factor, such as cancers, heart attacks and strokes. Any drop in deaths is to be applauded, but it’s not going to be enough.
So what are we going to do about it? In Glasgow, dealing with the city’s alcohol problems is one of the key outcomes that all public sector organisations have signed up to: from health, to the council, to the police. There is a ten year plan with two key elements:
– Reduce the acceptability of excessive drinking
– Reduce the availability of alcohol
The second part will involve brave licensing decisions, and organised community action to stop the spread of licensed premises in neighbourhoods, especially in the most deprived areas where shops selling cheap booze sit side by side with bookmakers that never seem to close.
For everyone else, it’s never been easier to slip a bottle of something in with the shopping. While it’s never easy to go against the agenda of business and the need to make revenue from such businesses, this practical element is almost certainly the easier part of the task.
Interestingly, the just published NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde 2014 Health and Well Being Survey tells us that there is an increase in the proportion of adults saying that they never drink and that those in deprived areas are even less likely to drink.
So it’s not the booze that’s killing those people early, but high rates of smoking, bad diet and poverty. According to the survey, there’s been an overall decrease in reported weekly consumption, although 43 per cent of those that drink reported binge drinking in the last week.
Many of us are not totally honest in surveys, especially the ones that cover the big topics we lie to the doctor about: eating habits, weight and weekly alcohol units consumed.
Binge drinking is officially classed as over six units at once for women, and eight for men. For women, that means two large glasses of wine is a binge; so maybe I’m off beam here, but I suspect that the actual figure for people regularly drinking more than that is probably higher.
Many of us are not totally honest in surveys, especially the ones that cover the big topics we lie to the doctor about: eating habits, weight and weekly alcohol units consumed.
For example, according to the survey, only 34 per cent of Glaswegians will have had a drink of alcohol in the last week. So if we believe this survey, the culture change bit will be easy too, because it appears we are already changing.
This then begs the question: do we really believe that? Does that chime with our lived experience? Is alcohol finally, slowly becoming less important in our Scottish culture? I want to believe that this is the case, but here are two classic examples that say not quite yet.
A few weeks ago, there was a leaving drinks do in a pub after work. A male colleague in his 30s, who wasn’t drinking even though he had no childcare responsibilities that evening, got tons of abuse from colleagues and pressure to drink.
It so happened he wasn’t drinking because hadn’t been feeling that sparkling, and knew it was one of the things that made him feel worse. In Scotland, instead of applauding that insight into our mental wellbeing, we mock it.
The other is my own mother. Dead last year at 67, officially from a brain haemorrhage, it was the drink that got her and we all knew it. She wasn’t a poverty statistic in a report, but a middle class woman, quietly drinking herself to death at home, all the while telling her doctor that she didn’t drink.
Dead last year at 67, officially from a brain haemorrhage, it was the drink that killed my mother and we all knew it.
Her drinking was the elephant in the room, even in her death. The lure of a husband, a home, four children and six grandchildren wasn’t enough to stop the addiction. And nowhere is she recorded as a death caused by alcohol, or a life ruined by it. Most tellingly of all, nobody really wanted to talk about it apart from her family and she shut us all down.
These are just two stories. Maybe they don’t mean much. Or maybe they remind you of your life in this cold and slightly drunken land. Maybe you’ve teased a friend who doesn’t want to drink, mainly because you want them to drink with you.
Maybe you’ve turned a blind eye to other people’s drinking, because it’s not your business, or because you don’t like confrontation. Or maybe your own experience is that day to day life looks a hell of a lot better after a pint or two.
The lure of those lovely drinks I described is strong, for many of us. And increasingly, more of us are drinking too much, both socially, and at home in order to unwind and relax, and without thinking, we become dependent on those drinks. And right at that point we are at the top of a very slippery slope.
This is no lecture from me about your drinking. I am not a health professional. But my experience in the last few years and the knowledge I have gained through my job, have made me look at my own drinking habits honestly.
I opened my eyes and I didn’t like what I saw. It’s made me think consciously about cutting down on alcohol. And that’s the truth of it. We can have all the leaflets in the world – and they are indeed useful if they lead people to the local services that can help them cut down, such as ABI (alcohol brief intervention) but people need to decide for themselves that their drinking is not good and cut it down or stop.
This is no lecture from me about your drinking. I am not a health professional. But my experience in the last few years and the knowledge I have gained through my job, have made me look at my own drinking habits honestly.
To get that point, we need to look around us, at our family and friends and colleagues and, yes, ourselves. Especially if you are in your early to mid- 40s, male or female.
Look at the people you know who are heavy drinkers. Aside from those who die officially from alcohol liver disease, it seems there are two types of deaths of these people.
The younger ones (up to mid-40’s) usually go because of other additional factors, such as obesity, weak hearts from lack of exercise etc. Unless any young person goes on a one-off, three bottles of vodka binge that would kill a horse, an otherwise healthy and fit human will generally get away with it for longer.
But even those gym-loving booze hounds are on a rocky path. Keep at it and you’re still screwed. How many really heavy drinkers/alcoholics do you know who are still alive after 70? And you’ll probably have spent the last the last 10 years beset with various health ailments, in and out of hospital, costing the NHS a fortune and nothing but misery to those around you.
Pissheads who are still alive and still drinking after the age of 70 are rare, but those that are, will often be brain damaged and incoherent.
That’s the path, that’s the conversation we need to have. You’re still take your chances at life and death with the more moderate path, but you get a better chance of avoiding a grim and horrible death.
I’d rather surrender to the cosmiverse by falling off Ben Nevis at 85, than in a bed in A&E in my 60s. Of course, I’d rather go in my sleep if possible, but I’d rather the mountain took me than cirrhosis.
People can choose their own way, but they need to be confronted with the stark reality of what lies ahead and make their choice based on that understanding.
The path is there. People can choose their own way, but they need to be confronted with the stark reality of what lies ahead and make their choice based on that understanding. Sometimes people are lucky and get a wake up call; something that doesn’t kill them, but changes them.
Others are not so – they are gone in a heartbeat. Changing our ways is not easy, but it’s worth it. And it’s hard to imagine sometimes, but the good things in life are just as good when you are sober.
Campaigns are good but we need to start being honest about our own behaviour. It needs to be normalised for a young guy to go to the pub and not drink, even if he’s driving, or for a woman, even if she’s not pregnant.
It’s a good sign that people are doing this more. There is hope that younger people might not end up as full of the drink as their parents. Without it, we might find the energy for life beyond just getting by.
We might find time to change things. If we are ready to have the conversation.
Are you?
Picture courtesy of Kimery Davis