OxBlog

# Posted 11:07 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

NEWSFLASH: THE BRITISH ARE DRUNK. In the UK it's a fact of life. But the NYT provides an admirable summary of the evidence:

"There is a clear and growing problem in our town and city centers up and down the country on Friday and Saturday nights," said [Prime Minister] Blair, whose son, then 16, was found vomiting and incoherent on a London street four years ago after an evening of drinking.

Wow. Sixteen. He had Jenna & Barabara beat by a good two years.

Government statistics show that Britons on average drank the equivalent of 8.6 liters of pure alcohol each in 2001, nearly double the rate of 1951. That translates into more than 86 bottles of wine, or 350 pints of beer...

While people in a number of countries still drink more overall, Britons (and the Irish, as well) are likelier to go on drinking binges, consuming five, six, seven or more drinks in a single session. "Binge drinking is now so routine that young people find it difficult to explain why they do it," a recent Home Office report said.

That's not fair! They reason they can't explain what they're doing is because they're drunk!

On weekends, 70 percent of emergency-room patients are involved in drink-related incidents. Deaths from chronic liver disease in England, a crucial indicator of alcohol-related harm, have shot up more than fivefold since 1950...

Dr. Atkinson said he did not know why Britons tended toward violence and accidents after drinking.

Either the good doctor is being quoted out of context or socialized medicine has resulted in idiots becoming doctors.

The northern [European] countries, including Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia, are more ambivalent about alcohol, relying on it as a crucial social lubricant while also treating it as something that needs to be tightly controlled lest it spin out of control.

Having lived in the UK, I'd say that by 'tightly controlled', what the Times actually means is "available to anyone old enough to shave."

Even genteel Cambridge has had so many problems with street drunkenness that it is debating whether to forbid outdoor drinking.
"Youth culture is just drink, drink, drink," said Eleanor Smith, a 57-year-old retired secretary who lives off Mill Road, one of the rowdiest drinking spots in Cambridge.

Perhaps Oxford is different from Cambridge, but I'd say that youth culture in Britain is also about "drugs, drugs, drugs" and "sex, sex, sex". (For the record, OxBlog thinks of itself as firmly anti-drug.)