Drogas y Alcohol En La Juventud

Drugs and alcohol
On the streets of binge Britain

Every weekend, Britain's town centres are transformed into scenes of drunken mayhem and soaring levels of violence. Jay Rayner visits the front line and asks whether licensing laws are to blame or a drinks industry that has wooed a generation with cheap alcopops and vodkatinis

Sunday September 5, 2004
The Observer

The middle-aged womansprawled on the ground in front of me, in her black dress and perilous night-out heels, will definitely have a headache in the morning. She'll deny it was the booze of course, however much she has had, just as her son will deny it was the booze that caused him to tumble backwards into her as he was ejected from the pub for being drunk and unruly, so that her head hit the pavement with a deadclunk. He'll continue to insist the doormen assaulted him, even though the police have already checked the CCTV footage and satisfied themselves they did nothing of the sort.
It is the Saturday night of the August Bank Holiday weekend, and in the pedestrianised heart of Basingstoke, a tidy shopping street punctuated by vast neon-clad drinking halls, the Hampshire constabulary are busy policing thenight-time economy. They call an ambulance for the mother, tell the son to calm down and take a cab to the hospital. They disperse the drink-sodden crowd that has gathered to watch.
If you don't include the two drunks with stab wounds (thought to be self-inflicted) who were dealt with earlier on, and the 'yellow cards' issued for anti-social behaviour - pissing in doorways, shouting abuse in thestreet - this is the first major incident of the night. There's more to come, though. A little while later we get reports of an unprovoked attack. We find the victim perched on the kerb just down from Market Square nursing a bleeding cut to the brow that will need a stitch or two. 'This bloke came from nowhere,' says his friend. 'He was really drunk, he was. He said, "You're lucky I didn't take yourface off, you bald bastard".' Steve still has it in him to smile at the reference to his prematurely bald pate. Another cluster of police. Another ambulance. Later still there's a third incident: a drunken brawl in the street, one woman stamping on the head of another. 'Remarkable,' says the officer who just happened by. 'She lifted up her foot and down it came.'
But the really remarkable thingabout all this, the really troubling thing, is that, according to the Basingstoke police, it is 'a quiet night'. Although they would like me to think it was down to smart policing - which partly it is - they also know it's the luck of the draw. 'Last night was hectic,' another officer says to me. 'We had two colleagues assaulted, punch-ups, the works.' This, they say, is the reality of bingedrinking in Britain today. 'Town centres used to be butcher, baker, pub,' PC Mark O'Hanlon says. 'But now there are big out-of-town supermarkets, so the butchers and the bakers become pubs too, and huge ones at that.' In come the promotions: the two-for-one deals, the rock-bottom discounts on pints, the drink-all-you-like-for-£20 offers. And the police are the ones who have to clean up the mess.Britain keeps going out on the piss. Tony Blair has labelled binge drinking - generally defined as necking twice the recommended daily number of units, four for men, three for women - as 'a new British disease'. For once this does not appear to be spin. The statistics speak for themselves: each year 14 million working days are lost due to alcohol abuse. Half of all violent crime - around 1.2mincidents a year - is attributed to binge drinking. At weekends 70 per cent of all admissions toA&E are the result of boozing. A study just released found that two-thirds of all ambulance calls on Friday and Saturday nights in London are alcohol related, costing the service nearly £20m. Bingeing accounts for 40 per cent of all drinking occasions among men and 22 per cent among women and the numbers are...