Behind The Headlines: Binge drinking costing us all
GOING out on a Saturday night used to be such a simple business.
A big night roughly translated as sinking a few beers – sometimes straight from work – and then, depending on the mood, carrying on until the early hours before staggering home with a kebab and eventually to bed in the certainty that you would wake up with a hangover the following day.
But at some point in the very recent past, things have begun to change.
Two very significant developments have been announced in Northampton within the past few days alone that certainly serve as a tacit warning to people of the changes heavy drinking are making to society as a whole.
Firstly, NHS Northamptonshire announced that people admitted to A&E for drink-related injuries would be assessed by a mental health nurse to try to determine the level of an individual’s problem. It might very well include a follow-up appointment, which, doubtless, health chiefs hope will serve as a wake-up call to those “getting off their faces” and into a casualty ward in the course of a night out.
It was some statement of intent.
That same day the health authority announced that by 2015, the cost to NHS Northamptonshire of dealing with drink-related admissions – currently running at five a day – would be £4.4m, up from £2.9m now.
Indeed, County Hall experts estimate that, while alcohol-related admissions and violence are declining slowly, the overall “drinks bill” is £200m a year, by the time you have factored in crime, health costs, accidents, vandalism and hungover people missing work.
The NHS also issued a range of stats that revealed 45 per cent of young people aged 18-25 in Northamptonshire could be drinking so much they have a much higher chance of dying, while 3,500 people have become so dependent on drink they struggle to get up in the morning without one.
The second, and much more visible development, was the announcement this week of a so-called “field hospital” to be parked outside All Saints Church on Saturday nights and so-called “pay day Fridays” (last night as it happens). Here, volunteers will bravely tackle the walking wounded and generally plastered (largely young) people who need medical help, but don’t necessarily need to clog up the (already packed) A&E at at Northampton General Hospital.
By a curious coincidence, Channel 4 launched a new fly-on-the wall documentary (see page 51) Party Paramedics which looked at a similar operation in Colchester, a city with striking similarities to Northampton. If people wanted a foretaste of what to expect, this was it. A succession of casualties escalating as the night went on and the amount of alcohol consumed increased.
Is the real issue here, however, not that these undoubtedly well thought out and necessary additional services are being provided, but why people are drinking so much in the first place that they get into this state in such numbers? Is increased recreational drug use a factor? Are people drinking less beer, but far more alcopops and shots of high alcohol content booze? Are the busy, hectic lives that people live today – holding down that job amid all the uncertainty, never being quite able to switch off their mobile phone or Facebook page and so on – making us so wound up like a coil that when that release does come on a Friday or Saturday night, we unravel with occasionally dire consequences?
There is one beautiful irony here. Before I began to wind down my big nights out a few years ago, we happily downed pint after pint and carried on the next day without fuss. These days people are constantly subjected to messages coming from Government and elsewhere about the perils of drinking too much and sticking to your recommended weekly levels. While the grown-up middle classes now sit quaking with worry over whether to have that last glass of wine, there’s a sizeable chunk of the population for whom drinking too much – and all the consequences that come with it – appear to mean diddly squat. That’s the real battle that lies ahead and we seem a long way off cracking it.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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Comments
There are 9 comments to this article
Page 1 of 1
willi eckaslyke
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 05:54 PMlady m...we are of course not referring to the human race; only the British version of it....a random mutation to use a Darwinian phrase.
lady muck
Monday, January 30, 2012 at 02:21 PMwilli...but Darwinism postulates that the human race would have evolved more able to handle alcohol...clearly we haven't.
willi eckaslyke
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:43 PMNot an odd theory at all SteveRiches...the medieval practice of giving children low alcohol ale because it was a lot safer than water, is of course where the phrase 'small beer' originated...That those kids then went on to produce a nation of compulsive boozers, seems not to have been picked up by Charles Darwin.
lady muck
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:30 PMI doubt that mental nurses will be able to do much more than point out the effects of alcohol. If we are to tackle the nation's alcohol problem, we need education starting with 5 yr olds...Similar comments apply to drugs, STD's, obesity, etc etc....
SteveRiches
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:10 PMI have an odd theory: in the Middle Ages our water was so polluted that the safest thing to drink was ale. These are the people who survived, so a huge proportion of our current population have an inherited genetic prediliction for imbibing alcohol. When Brits took over another country (eg. India), the first thing they built was a brewery, the second was a church, the third was a school.
willi eckaslyke
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 10:55 PMSteve...The world is choc full of people without hope, but the only places outside Britain where you will find a pub on every street corner, are those spots where the Brits like to take their holiday (they won't go there otherwise)
SteveWonder
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 09:57 PMthe Gin Craze was an entirely working class phenomenon. the majority of kids being deposited onto smelly old matresses on the floor of AE are lacking in any kind of silver spoon. Maybe it is all down to a feeling of hopelessness.............. or the crap 3rd rate education we in this country seem to accept. what with Eton taking all tee best teachers
Links
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 06:03 PMWhat a load of hand-wringing nonsense. The simple fact of the matter is that Brits like a drink. It's not a new phenomena either, it just cyclically comes to the fore; you only have to look at the so called Gin Craze that gripped the country in the 18th century to see that. What was it, 4 or 5 different acts of parliament they passed to try and moderate peoples drinking back then? No doubt we've got that to come around again too!
willi eckaslyke
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 04:07 PMDuring a month-long stay in hospital a couple of years ago, it became quite noticeable that the principal topic of conversation among the British nurses was restricted almost entirely to stories of boozing, partying & nooky....There has been a culture of drinking to excess in these islands, that goes back at least to Tudor times....Even those deemed to be 'thoroughly respectable members of society', automatically celebrate an occasion by heading for the drink - albeit from a decanter on the sideboard ("let's all have a celebratory drink!")...In this country, boozing is in the blood - in more ways than one...Despite lots of 'official' noises of dissent, the government doesn't want things to change - any more than the Bridge Street muppets do.
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