Gen Y Brits Are Century’s Biggest Drinkers
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Gen Y Brits Are Century’s Biggest Drinkers

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world's biggest drinkersWhen Mosaic Science published a piece on how a generation of Britons born in the 1980s became the heaviest drinkers in a century, I wasn’t too terribly shocked. Having lived in London in 2004, the year of “Peak Booze,” I can attest: all bets were off when it came to a boozy night out.

And what does “Peak Booze” mean? In 2004, British Gen-Y-ers were downing 9.5 liters of alcohol per person, more than double the national average consumed in 1950. Why did these eighties babies take to the bottle so hard? A little modern British history lesson explains a lot.

Flashback 50 Years

Chrissie Giles, the author of the story, traces the reasons for this cultural shift in drinking habits. Marketing played a big role, but gender politics did too, and—this being the U.K.—so did the weather.

In the 1930s through the 50s, working-class men dominated pubs. Their houses were crowded; at the pub men were free to smoke, play games, bet, sing, play piano, buy and sell goods and catch up on news. They mostly drank pale ale, which was usually locally brewed with a 3% alcohol content. But marketers were really pushing lager, a stronger European beer. Brits wanted none of it until the famously hot and sunny summer of 1975. Heineken touted their lager as “refreshing” and that year it connected with sun-soaked U.K. consumers, who were celebrating their rare break from cold and rain. People soon loved lager’s chilly fizz and higher alcohol content, and sales took off. Between the 1970s and 1985, sales of ale declined by 10 million barrels, and sales of lager grew by 12 million.

From Recession to Rave

Hard economic times slowed things down in the 1980s. But when the 90s hit, the economy recovered and the era of the Ladette began. In this decade, women savored hard-fought privileges by becoming one of the lads. They found themselves on an even playing field with men both in the bedroom and the bar. Without women dutifully putting the brakes on a long night out, men began drinking more as well. Pubs changed from sawdust floors to big-windowed expanses and wine was poured to the top of the glass.

Even outdoor raves, all night parties where Ecstasy was the drug of choice and booze was considered old school, were eventually turned into an opportunity to sell more drinks. By making even bigger venues, pub owners worked within the system so these raves could go indoors. The industry launched new drinks to pair with the psychoactives, wetting parched palates with sugary flavors that hid the powerful mixtures of vodka, white rum, and/or wine. The dreaded alcopops had arrived, just as the generation born in 1980 hit their teenage years.

Prices Down, Sales (And Violence) Up

Meanwhile, the cost of buying booze decreased every year from 1984 to 2007. Drinkers could afford to buy three times as much booze as they could in the 1980s.

In 2004, the same year the U.K. reached that 9.5 liter average, the Daily Telegraph published an article titled, “Ladettes Clog Casualty Units after Catfights,” highlighting a threefold increase in the number of drunk women getting in fights and ending up in the emergency room. The British Medical Association’s chairman noted, “It’s not just cuts and grazes, but fractured hands. . .and broken cheekbones.”

Picturing women behaving like drunken, male louts is still pretty shocking. We’ve heard so much about the genteel lady alcoholic, sipping wine at home—now she was out of the house, mini-skirted and glassing her boyfriend’s sister.

Incidents of glassing happened so often, many pubs replaced glass bottles with plastic bottles, and pint glasses with a tempered glass which was harder to break. But what’s even harder to break? A cultural habit of binge drinking. A whole generation seemed to have fallen into the habit of using booze to deal with all stressful aspects of life. As Gilles (a non-alcoholic) writes, “drinking made being a human easier.” That’s a whole nation with an alcoholic mindset.

Current British Party Stats

Gilles notes the generation coming through university now drinks less, and as such the UK’s annual consumption of booze dropped to 7.7 liters per person by 2013. Those stats don’t bear out further research: The World Health Organization has statistics showing that, “Britons . . .on average drink 11.6 liters of pure alcohol a year.” And the US? We hit 9.2 liters so we’re no slouches either, when it comes to getting hammered.

Clearly cultural input connects with all drinking behaviors. An atmosphere that nourishes binge drinking also promotes a consequence-free zone where alcoholics can indulge, hidden while quietly dying, amongst the madding (and glassing) crowd.

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About Author

Dana Burnell has written for The London Times Sunday Magazine, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, Inside New York and Time Out New York. A former Editorial Assistant at Harvard Review, she’s the received Mellon Foundation Grant and two Fiction Fellowship Grants from Columbia University. She’s written two novels, Mistaken Nonentity and The Tame Man.