The ruin of the drinking classes.

Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson wants to put a minimum price on alcohol in the belief that consumption can be controlled in this way. In fact of course a price rise will only really have an effect on the less well off. There won't be a noticeable decrease in the drinking done at golf clubs and Hampstead dinner parties and those drinkers with addiction problems with simply find a way to pay for their habit.

This is not to say that this country doesn't have a drink problem, we do and it impacts on us both as individuals and as a society. There has traditionally been a culture of hard drinking in this country especially amongst the working and upper classes with the middle class adopting a far more abstemious, tight-arsed attitude to drink (and life in general?) This last is no longer true of course and today's middle class are swilling down the vino collapso like there is no tomorrow. I don't think that many people would doubt that not only has drinking increased over the years but attitudes towards drunkenness have changed as well. I have my own pet theory about this. When I was growing up in the 50's and early 60s all teenagers drank but it was not considered very cool to get pissed. Being able to drink loads and stay sober was the thing that was respected. Later on middle class bohemians and working class fellow travellers like me started to get into speed and dope. Now there is little point smoking dozens of joints and it having no effect. Getting really stoned was the whole point. So we now had two quite different attitudes to the effect of booze on the one hand and dope on the other. A generation later and dope smoking had become mainstream and soon kids would be being introduced to alcohol and dope at more or less the same time. And this is my point, the attitude toward dope, i.e get stoned ASAP, was transferred to alcohol with the result that you can see in any town centre on a Saturday night. So that's my theory. If anyone gets a PhD thesis out of this they can buy me a pint