Londoners Magazine

Last week, as you may have seen from my blog, I went home. I was on Very Important Business interviewing some women who work in drug rehab. Two minutes into one of my interviews with a woman who works with children, my interviewee stops.

“The biggest drug of them all is alcohol. In my opinion, alcohol should be a class A drug”. Inside I was sighing and thinking: “Please don’t. Please just talk about the horrors of children taking cocaine and injecting heroin.”

But as she continued in her tirade, she was winning me over with every hyperbole. Because she wasn’t really exaggerating at all. My hometown is near Scarborough, a seaside town with old beach huts, stripy deck chairs, crumbling cliffs and even more crumbling faces. It is, in my opinion, a rather depressing place. It is stuck in the 1950s and it has a shocking rate of alcoholism, drug use and teenage pregnancy. You can choose to ignore all of this of course. Walk along the seafront and smell the fresh air, vinegar and cockles, but open your eyes and the problems are there to see.

So when I was listening to my interviewee despair over young people falling over drunk in the street, taking example from their parents and older siblings, I started to see her point. (Not the bit about alcohol being class A; that’s a bit of an exaggeration.)

What can be done? There’s enough education out there in schools and I don’t think it helps. Could European laws be the way to go? If we reduce the drinking age to 14 or 16 would it really prevent binge drinking? Or is it just a condition of the British people, unable to appreciate a fine bottle of St Emilion and instead opting for quick-fix White Lightning?

To be honest, I don’t think binge drinking will ever improve. I think children will always want to experiment and cure their boredom by getting drunk on fizzy apples. To my dear interviewee, you’re onto a positive thing, but I’m afraid that the irreversible damage to our children has been done.