From mother's milk to alcopops is too short a step Jasper Gerard
Sunday April 15, 2007
The Observer
Round-the-clock drinking was meant to uncork, even in the moodiest boulevards of Bognor, a sophisticated Left Bank cafe society, with bright young things charging glasses of chilled pinot grigio while discussing existentialist philosophy.
Alas, a year-and-a-half later, the nearest we typically come to existential angst in the early hours is when concerned friends asking paramedics: 'Is she dead or just unconscious?'
Such evenings can now render even the most infamous roistering session of Oliver Reed a rather dainty meeting of the Temperance League. The papers are full of pictures of youngsters semi-naked and wasted; they might be sprawled across a road, or throwing up, or having sex, or rather, given their awareness levels, having sex done to them. Even ministers concede this is hardly the Sartrean cafe society they had in mind.
Being no stranger to the devil's milk, I'd opposed 'booze crackdowns', despite observing the ravages of alcohol on somebody close to me. Well, if teenagers are mature enough to die for their country and bleed for the Exchequer, can you leave them gasping for a Bacardi Breezer? But then the IPPR think-tank invited me to investigate the effects of drinking on youngsters and I was forced to conclude the drinking age should rise to 21 - if only as an experiment - because we face an epidemic. . . . . .
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