Binge drinking has become one of the great health anxieties of our age – and a public nuisance that makes newspaper readers quiver with indignation. Every few months, a tabloid runs a double-page spread on ‘Binge-drinking Britain’, accompanied by pictures of young people vomiting, throwing punches and smashing windows after they’ve toppled out of a town-centre nightclub. And that’s just the women.
Over the last 20 years, a combination of factors, including a drastic relaxation of licensing laws, has created new patterns of public drunkenness among drinkers in their teens and twenties.
As this crisis unfolded, the media developed a fascination with the phenomenon of ‘ladettes’ – brawling or comatose girls who behaved like boys after a night spent tossing back vodka shots. Newspapers that once printed blurred photographs of female binge drinkers now have websites that link to video footage of girls waving their breasts at the camera or furiously clawing at each other’s frocks in sordid late-night catfights. And should viewers wish to explore this phenomenon in more depth, there’s enough footage on the internet to keep them occupied for hours.
But ‘ladette’ is now a rather dated term. It belongs to the 1990s, when the behaviour of these young women had more shock value than it does now. That doesn’t mean that ladette-style behaviour is less of a problem than it was: rather, we’re just more used to it, and take it for granted that if we see a crowd of students stumbling through a town centre the girls will be as wasted as the boys.
Some YouTube videos seem to be aimed at men turned on by the sight of ‘fit’ girls who are blind drunk. One video is entitled: ‘Young woman drunk in McDonald’s (Inverness)’. It shows two teenage girls dragging a third girl, very pretty but insensible with drink, across the floor of the restaurant and down the stairs. In broad daylight. It has been watched over a million times, which is creepy when you consider how vulnerable the girl must have been to rape.
Other, less disturbing, YouTube clips extract comic value from female binge-drinking. They present it as a spectator sport, like watching women mud-wrestle (something these girls might be good at, judging by their hair-trigger tempers). Some films set the women’s antics to music; others put the film on a loop, so you can watch the same girl fall over or throw up to your heart’s content. But, as I say, the novelty value has worn off since the heyday of what you might call the ‘ladette panic’ of a few years ago, in which drunken women came to symbolise public anxieties in much the same way as the drink-sodden prostitutes of Gin Lane.
The really interesting question is what has happened to the original ladettes, now married or divorced women in their mid to late thirties. Some of them, at least, need little encouragement to slip back into their old ways. For a cautionary tale of what happens when a middle-class woman overdoes it, let me refer you to a sliver of CCTV footage released to newspaper websites in 2011 by British Transport Police as a warning against drinking too much over Christmas.
In the words of the Daily Telegraph: ‘The cringeworthy footage shows the elegantly dressed woman appearing more than a little worse for wear as she alights from the late-night train at Barnsley station, South Yorks.
‘Wearing a hat, dress and what look to be flat shoes, she staggers off the carriage of the Northern service before violently lurching to her right and tumbling over. Throwing out an arm to support herself against the side of the train, she is unable to prevent her rapid descent and collapses on the ground before rolling off the platform.
‘The clip ends with the woman completely out of sight as she lies trapped between the train and the platform.’1
We can tell from the light-hearted tone of the report that the woman was unharmed, aside from a few cuts and bruises. The police had made the film public with the woman’s permission.
But if they thought the film would serve as a warning against alcohol, they were being naive. Instead, it went viral. Why was it so popular? Not because people found it scary, but because they found it so funny. But would the video have been such a hit if it had featured a man rather than a woman? I doubt it. Much of the humour (and here I must come clean: I did chuckle) derives from the sight of a neatly dressed lady toppling backwards and then turning over like a rolling pin before disappearing from sight.
The newspapers had more fun in June 2011, accusing middle-aged women of behaving like football hooligans when the 1990s boy band Take That visited Manchester and Cardiff for reunion concerts. As the Daily Mail reported, with unconcealed relish:
They arrived in their thousands, leaving their husbands and children at home and ready to relive their teenage past. But the excitement of seeing their idols in concert proved too much for hordes of Take That fans of a certain age.
More than 100 women were admitted to hospital after marathon drinking sessions and alcohol-fuelled brawls before the one-time boy band took to the stage.
The fans’ antics led to them being branded worse than drunken football hooligans. But they did win praise from Take That singer Robbie Williams, who is now teetotal following a long battle with drink and drugs.
‘We used to have the record for the number of girls fainting,’ the 37-year-old told the crowd at their concert in Cardiff on Wednesday night. ‘Now we have the record for the most middle-aged boozed-up women. I, Robbie Williams, am proud of you.’2
The superannuated Take That fans were mainly working-class, but they certainly included a fair number of middle-class women who had smuggled vodka into the concert. It was no isolated incident. Suburban women are discreetly engaging in heavy drinking sessions – though the extent of their boozing is disguised by bars and restaurants with goblet-shaped glasses that hold nearly half a pint of white wine. This is quite deliberate policy on the part of wine bars: the owners know that women feel less self-conscious about putting back ‘two or three glasses’ than a whole bottle, even if they end up drinking the same amount.
I’m sorry if my concentration on women binge-drinking seems sexist: no one is suggesting that they drink more or behave worse than their male partners, many of whom are extending their adolescent drinking patterns into early middle age. But it’s the social change that people have noticed. In fact, it’s the one that I’ve noticed, again and again. Two girls who were friends of mine when they were in their early twenties are now married with children and hose down the Chablis on their evenings in. I shouldn’t extrapolate from that, but I’ve also noticed the increased presence of women at AA meetings.
In Britain, there has been a rapid narrowing of the alcohol gender gap.3 Research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that binge drinking among women rose from eight per cent in 1998 to 15 per cent in 2006 – that is, almost doubled. Over the same period, male binge drinking increased only slightly, from 22 to 23 per cent. Note that these statistics aren’t restricted to ‘ladettes’: they refer to women of all ages. To spell it out: women are now exposed to changes in brain chemistry that had previously been restricted to men.
In America, too, there is anxiety about what Salon magazine calls ‘the trend of lady bingers’.4 According to the US National Women’s Law Center’s statistics for 2010, 10.6 per cent of women had sunk five or more drinks on at least one occasion in the past month.5 In England, the number of women drinking more than six units of alcohol on one occasion in the previous week (the NHS measure of bingeing – it’s eight units for men) was 15 per cent in 2006.6
These figures aren’t really comparable, since their methodology is so different – but the impression that British women binge drink more than American women is probably correct. Also, one has only to compare the YouTube videos to see that British girls get drunk in a different way from their US counterparts – that is, they’re far more likely to do so in plain view of others.
There’s a simple reason for this. In both cases, women are copying national male drinking habits. America has a taboo against public drunkenness that dates back to its puritan origins; Britain, on the other hand, has until recently extended reluctant tolerance to noisy drunks at closing time. It’s no accident that American videos show girls bouncing off the walls of their rooms, whereas there are countless clips of British women singing drunkenly in the street.
Despite these cultural differences, however, the ‘alcohol gender gap’ has been closing on both sides of the Atlantic – for mature women as well as for girls. American and British professional women no longer feel embarrassed about knocking back a few drinks after work. The cheeky cocktail culture depicted in Sex and the City is found in all major US cities and has spread to Britain.
The health consequences of this are serious. It’s not sexist to point out that women process alcohol less efficiently than men. To quote the US journalist Tracy Clark-Flory, ‘I’ve boasted that I could drink my male friends under the table, and I have at times through sheer force of will. Not even my iron will can force my liver to process booze differently, though.’7
When I was a drinker, I didn’t know many women with drink problems. Some of them threw up from time to time, but that was only to be expected. In the 1980s, young men and women tended not to go on binges together: the girls made their excuses and left as soon as the boys started boring them senseless with drunken boasting. Then again, perhaps the women were there and I just don’t remember them. Those years are distinctly soft-focus – which is a blessing, all things considered.
I also can’t remember when my binges turned into alcoholism. Maybe that’s because, for a very long time, they were the same thing. As I’m typing these words, I keep stopping to try to work out when my drinking got the better of me. But it’s tricky: I can’t distinguish between losing control of myself in the sense that everyone does when they’re intoxicated and losing control of my life because I was perpetually drunk and hung over.
I’ve heard many people in AA meetings announce that ‘alcohol was a liberation from my unhappy childhood’. I can relate to that. For me, booze was more like a tantalisingly short day pass from the prison I had constructed with my own behaviour.
I was one of those children whose natural curiosity was easily smothered by natural laziness. The town of Reading in the late 1970s was not a stimulating environment. My school, Presentation College, was run by Irish brothers whose real religion was football, a sport I loathed. Fortunately, some of my teachers were cut from a different mould: these were men whose intellectual exuberance was matched only by their fondness for alcohol. They became my friends; they still are. When I was in the sixth form, they took me to very ordinary pubs – there was no other sort in Reading – for what were, by my standards, riotously funny evenings in which I drank between three and five pints of lager. Crisps were consumed. Peanuts, too. It was heavenly.
It says something about my lack of self-awareness that not once during those sessions, or for years afterwards, did I notice that I was using lager to change my mood. But it’s not as if the clues weren’t there.
When I was in the pub with my school friends, I would get ratty if the pace of round-buying was slowed by leisurely drinkers. I had to fall back on a trick passed on to me, with quasi-masonic solemnity, by my geography teacher: ‘inter-round drinks’ – that is, a quick half pint or a whisky chaser bought surreptitiously on the way back from the loo.
Another clue: if, by any chance, the landlord of a pub decided to carry on serving alcohol after the cruelly early closing time of 10.30 p.m., my excitement was uncontainable. It was all I could do to stop myself falling at the feet of old Len Crook of the Spread Eagle. You’d think I was a convict whose life had just been spared by a magnanimous ruler. The extra two or three pints weren’t especially enjoyable: the peak of pleasure always came earlier in the evening, somewhere around the second pint. But, to use Kent Berridge’s terminology, my ‘wanting’ had continued to intensify even while the ‘liking’ levelled off.
I didn’t take a gap year; grammar school boys rarely did in 1980. If I had, perhaps I would have been better prepared for Oxford. My college, Mansfield, was small and unpretentious. God knows how I would have coped at Christ Church or Magdalen, but even so I was terrified. I discovered reserves of shyness that I didn’t know I possessed. Too nervous to talk to the other students in my college, I headed straight for the only place I’d visited as a sixth former, the Oxford Union. Debate nights offered an ideal opportunity to self-medicate with alcohol. They seemed to attract every lonely show-off in the university.
To cut a long story short, I fell in with a crowd who binge drank out of social insecurity. We didn’t call it binge drinking, of course, and none of us admitted to feelings of inferiority, though we enjoyed drawing attention to each other’s hang-ups.
Only one of us had been to a major public school. Simon was a charming, feckless and foggy-headed Etonian who, stuck in a minor college and from a penniless family, basked in our sycophancy rather than trying to gain entry to the tightly policed dining societies run by the Old Etonian elite. He was also an uncompromising boozer. You drank until you fell over – and no complaints the next day. Hangovers were ‘common’.
Thank God he was away serving in the Army when I attended his sister’s 21st birthday party and threw up into his grandmother’s handbag.
Social insecurity isn’t often cited as a factor in binge drinking, but perhaps it should be. I’m thinking especially of the misery that comes from finding yourself surrounded by smart people you want to emulate. Oxford in the early 1980s was full of undergraduates from modest backgrounds trying to ‘pass’, as they used to say in the Deep South. (I can recall only one boy from an unglamorous day school who, thanks to his spectacular good looks, did break into Oxford high society, and that was the future actor then known as ‘Hughie’ Grant.)
This was the heyday of the Sloane Ranger – and the fake Sloane Ranger, recognisable by his suspiciously clean Barbour oilskin jacket and chain-store brogues. Maybe this is just my impression, but the fakes, of whom I was one, seemed to be more extravagant drunks than the real thing. There was a pathetic quality to our all-night benders. We were acting a role, none too convincingly.
Although we’d got into Oxford, our fogeyish high jinks remind me a bit of the sad mock-Brideshead antics of dining clubs at redbrick universities. We stole traffic cones and set off fire extinguishers in feeble imitations of the practised horseplay of boys brought up on country estates. I don’t recall meeting a single member of the Bullingdon Club in three years – but if I had, I have a horrible suspicion I’d have asked for his autograph.
How many of us turned into alcoholics? It’s difficult to say. For some, heavy drinking was a phase. Others remained locked into the pattern of bingeing that they laid down for themselves when they were at university.
A study of 600 Finnish twins published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Environmental Research in 2011 found that drinking problems at 16 ‘robustly predict alcohol diagnoses’ at 25.8 It certainly predicted mine, though I waited until the age of 32 before announcing, ‘My name’s Damian and I’m an alcoholic.’
I arrived in Fleet Street in 1989, paying virtually no rent and with a fat expense account. Even by the standards of young journalists, I was a flamboyant drunk. In those days the satirical magazine Private Eye gave an honourable mention to the drunkest person at their very crowded and boozy annual party. I shouldn’t be proud, though of course I am, of the fact that I won it in 1992. And this when I was the religious affairs correspondent of a national newspaper. (To put that in perspective, I should point out that my best professional contacts – the so-called ‘gin, lace and backbiting’ fraternity of High Anglican priests – could have drunk most politicians under the table. Some of them even conducted Communion services while inebriated; one wonders how Archbishop Cranmer would have reacted to hearing his stately prose delivered in a drunken slur.)
By the age of 30, I’d started doing something I swore I’d never do: drinking on my own. To my surprise, I discovered that sitting at home with a bottle of red wine wasn’t a lonely business. On the contrary, it was – or seemed to be – a cure for loneliness. This was my way of replacing people by things. At the time I didn’t grasp that the substance had taken the place of my old friends – in other words, that I was sliding towards addiction in the most predictable manner. In my experience, all addicts think of themselves as special cases. It’s only recently that I’ve come to think of myself as a fairly typical casualty of an environment saturated with my drug of choice. But at some level I did come to think of red wine as congenial company – that is, until it ran out, a situation I learned to avoid by buying two bottles from Oddbins on my way home from work. And if I felt the need to talk, there was always the telephone.
‘Drunk dialling’ is one of the worst ordeals that loquacious drunks can inflict on their friends, and I was an absolute menace. Thank God email wasn’t around. Or Twitter, the perfect platform for drunks sitting at home with a bottle of claret who feel the urge to curse like fishwives or deliver a maudlin confession to the world that they will reread in horror the next morning. The thought of it makes my blood run cold.
One morning in 1992 I woke up in a strange bed, alone in a strange house. I had to tiptoe into the drawing room and check the family photographs on the mantelpiece to work out which kind soul had taken me in. That was the sort of thing that happened to me all the time. But I never got used to the chaos; at some level I was deeply ashamed.
What I hated in particular was the unpredictable quality of my drinking. In the words of the AA saying I quoted earlier, I was one of those alcoholics who say to themselves: ‘I’m going to the pub tonight and I won’t get totally smashed.’ And sometimes I didn’t.
But the evenings when, by some fluke, I managed to stay relatively sober were becoming rarer and rarer. Three or four mornings a week, I would ring my closest woman friend, Cristina Odone, the mini-skirted Italian editor of the Catholic Herald. ‘I did it again,’ I would say. ‘Madonna!’ she would sigh.
Cristina wasn’t a drinker, but Clare (not her real name), another women I greatly respected, was in the AA fellowship and had quietly made it clear that if I ever wanted to try it out, she’d take me to a meeting.
On 15 April 1994, I rang Cristina and confessed to a disastrous binge which had begun, implausibly, over lunch with a heavy-drinking aide to the Archbishop of Canterbury and taken me all over the West End. Don’t ask me where; I have no idea. That I ended up in my own bed, alone, was a miracle. I rang the Catholic Herald.
Cristina said: ‘Either you call Clare, or I do. Which is it to be?’
I called Clare.
Recently I was talking to a psychiatrist at a teaching hospital attached to London University. He asked me about my university drinking and, since he’s an old friend, I told him frankly that I’d belonged to a circle of unhappy pissheads who were looked on with pity by other students. ‘We were very much in a minority, and we knew it,’ I added.
‘Well, you certainly wouldn’t be in a minority now,’ he said.
No one could deny that students are more vigorous binge drinkers than they were a generation ago. The explanation for this lies in the convergence of the different types of availability.
The simultaneous weakening of the taboos against women drinking and against extreme drinking in public has been methodically exploited by alcohol manufacturers. As a report by the think-tank Demos observes: ‘The landscape of the night-time economy has obviously grown around existing demand, but sometimes supply can create demand. In other words, when young people go out into this landscape they are to some extent encouraged to indulge in reckless intoxicated behaviour, because that is what the landscape has been set up to do.’9 Bar crawling doesn’t involve much time-consuming travel: the next port of call is just a couple of doors away.
Supermarkets, too, have contributed hugely to the economic availability of alcohol. They sell wine, beer and spirits as loss-leaders. That’s one of the main reasons alcohol was 69.4 per cent more affordable in 2007 than it was in 1980.10
Clearly there’s some sort of social epidemic going on. Drinks manufacturers benefit from it, but there are other considerations that have nothing to do with profit margins. University students are placing greater stress on binge drinking as a social bonding exercise. We can see the alcohol gender gap closing with a vengeance on campuses all over the UK. If the British government meets its ridiculous target of sending 50 per cent of all young people to university, then it had better prepare for a sharp increase in the number of alcoholic casualties – especially among women whose bodies are constitutionally ill-suited to bingeing.
But binge drinking isn’t only a British problem, or an American one; it’s spreading to countries which have never had a tradition of public drunkenness – which have regarded such behaviour as a source of shame, indeed.
Just as southern European countries were protected from high rates of heart disease by the fabled ‘Mediterranean diet’, so their patterns of alcohol consumption ruled out the boozy street theatre so familiar to Britons. The French, admittedly, drank wine with a relentlessness that endangered their livers, but the steady pace meant that their intoxication didn’t draw attention to itself. As for Italy and Spain, alcohol was an accompaniment to food in restaurants, consumed at an inexplicably gentle pace. (I’ll never be able to understand the appeal of a single glass of wine with a plate of pasta. I mean, why bother?)
This old Mediterranean pace of drinking is being challenged, however, by young Spaniards and Italians who have developed a taste for bingeing. Spain is now overrun by teenagers who sit around drinking a mixture of whisky and coke from a plastic bottle known as el botellon, the big bottle. By 2004 it was being reported that 44 per cent of 15- to 19-year-old boys in Spain regularly get drunk, a proportion that had doubled since the start of the decade. Only a quarter of teenage girls got drunk – but that, too, represented a doubling of the percentage.11 The old folks are scandalised.
This trend isn’t confined to Europe. The Singaporean government has declared binge drinking to be ‘an emerging issue’, and the local media have taken enthusiastically to illustrating it. In the words of one news report: ‘He got drunk at a friend’s house and ended up taking off all his clothes in the bathroom. “The next thing I knew,” said student Mervyn Lee, 19, “I woke up in my friend’s bed wearing a fresh pair of shorts.”’12 That might strike a Glaswegian as an unremarkable episode, something barely worth mentioning, but in a society gripped by control freakery, as Singapore is, even a teenager drunkenly misplacing his shorts is a cause for alarm.
The outbreak of Western-style drinking in east Asia has surprised the authorities, who imagined that a genetic intolerance to alcohol would protect their citizens. But many young people are prepared to put up with the embarrassment of ‘Asian flush syndrome’, as it’s known, and the vomiting that goes with it. A British foreign correspondent who spent five years in Japan told me: ‘Every time I think of Tokyo, I can smell the stench of puke on the underground. It’s one of the reasons I was glad to leave.’
Young Asians aren’t, of course, modelling their social lives on those of British bingers. Singaporean and British students are drawing common inspiration from the exaggerated depictions of US college partying they pick up from films and television. Even American students are trying to live up to the stereotype of hard-drinking frat houses. One US website offers a list of ‘the 15 wildest partying movies’ to watch during spring break, which it describes as ‘the perfect time to do beer bongs on the beach, soak up the sun and cram into a dance club with date rapists and other revellers’.13
In America, the problem isn’t that the proportion of college students who binge drink is rising: around 40 per cent of them have been doing so for a long time. The notable development is that the frequency of their drinking sessions is increasing. Around a quarter of students get drunk two or three times over a two-week period, whereas the figure in 2000 was under 20 per cent.14
This squares with my own conversations with university and school teachers in Britain. The amount young people are drinking now has as much to do with their habit of drinking more often as with the total amount they consume on any one evening. Regular ‘partying’ – a purely American verb until a few years ago – has replaced occasional parties; celebration has become a habit. It’s true that young people have never needed encouragement to celebrate, but the ever-increasing popularity of ‘themed’ events at colleges means that scarcely a day goes by without an excuse to get wasted. And not just on alcohol, either.
No account of alcohol binges can leave pills and powders out of the picture. For partygoers, they belong to the same hedonic experience. That’s a dramatic social change, and one that policymakers – who grew up when alcohol and drugs were very different things – have difficulty getting their heads around.
When I was at university, even smoking a joint was loaded with social significance. Plenty of people did so, but for most of them – certainly for me – it was a self-conscious, slightly thrilling, journey into the world of ‘taking drugs’.
As with heavy drinking, there was an aspirational aspect to it. Dope smoking was associated with public schoolboys and especially Old Etonians. An acquaintance of mine smoked quite a few spliffs with David Cameron, the future Prime Minister. Whether Cameron tried anything harder at Oxford isn’t clear, but it’s interesting that, in 2012, neither the Prime Minister nor the Chancellor of the Exchequer had denied snorting cocaine. Neither, come to think of it, had the current President of the United States, nor his predecessor. One of these days someone should write a book entitled Tory MPs Who Have Done Drugs. It wouldn’t necessarily be a slim volume. (One former MP whom I know for a fact has a nose like a vacuum cleaner recently told his local radio station he’d never touched anything stronger than alcohol.)
The arrival and instant popularity of Ecstasy in the mid 1980s did two things: it blurred the distinction between hard and soft drugs and it introduced millions of young people to the notion of a binge in the form of a pill. Ecstasy produced a more euphoric effect than alcohol – at least for the first few times – but the duration of the hit and the bleak come-down followed the trajectory of an alcoholic bender. Also, such was the social acceptability of the drug that many youngsters who previously felt no inclination to get smashed every weekend now found themselves using the products of an illegal laboratory to manipulate their moods.
Probably not one person in a thousand who takes MDMA (the active ingredient in Ecstasy) can tell you what the letters stand for. The answer is methylenedioxymethamphetamine. As the drug researchers Harvey Milkman and Stanley Sunderwirth point out, the second half of that word should be a red flag to anyone.
‘Meth’ is one the nastiest street drugs known to man, and its (originally) middle-class derivative Ecstasy has a similar capacity to cause long-term brain damage by overstimulating serotonin and dopamine.15 We still don’t know what price the first generation of ‘E’ users will pay for their quasi-religious devotion to the drug now that they’re entering middle age. And what has happened in the meantime makes research far more complicated, since MDMA has seeped out of the clubs and into bars all over the world, mutating chemically as it does so. In the process, cocaine has also lost much of its mystique: coke, Ecstasy, ketamine – what you take largely depends on what’s around.
Dr Max Pemberton’s work as a psychiatrist in the Accident and Emergency department of a London hospital involves asking young patients about their drug and alcohol history. ‘As soon as they know I’m not going to rat on them, most of them admit to doing something – coke, MDMA, mephedrone, ketamine – in the previous few days,’ he says.
‘What the older generation doesn’t understand is that combining drugs and alcohol is normal for young clubbers. They might do a bit of coke before they go out, or “pre-loading” with a few drinks, then go to a bar and get drunk, do a line of coke in the loos and stop drinking. If they go on to a club they’ll drop a pill – or maybe pure MDMA, because no one trusts Ecstasy these days. They don’t know what’s in it. The last thing they want to do then is drink and many of the clubs won’t even serve alcohol anyway. Then they go back to someone’s house and want to come down, so they use Zopiclone, Zolpidem or Valium.’
Is this typical behaviour for young people? ‘Well, let’s say the ones who aren’t risk averse. They know they’re doing something a bit naughty. But now that anyone can buy pills off the internet, there’s isn’t the same sense of personal risk. And a lot of these drugs are really, really cheap when they first appear. If it costs literally pennies to get off your face, why spend forty quid or more doing it on booze?
‘I used to see long lines of kids queuing outside Fabric [a London nightclub geared towards party-hard middle-class trendies] in the early hours of the morning. It was freezing and they were only wearing T-shirts and I thought: if the police lined them up for a drugs test every single one of them would test positive. But, as I say, that sort of behaviour is normal now. It’s part of taking control of your own psychopharmacology. It’s about wanting everything. And it’s not going away.’
Indeed. New clubbing drugs are emerging almost every week. In 2010 alone, 40 new substances were released on to UK streets – nearly all of them ‘legal highs’. All that means is that the Government hadn’t caught up with them yet. As it is, there are now over 600 substances controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
The internet, inevitably, is accelerating the dissemination of these substances. As they say in the tech start-up community, e-commerce is infinitely scalable: websites selling drugs can serve as many customers as their owners have supplies to satisfy. There’s no need to recruit an army of street dealers when you’ve got a PayPal-enabled web page. The sheer speed of this process means that toxicologists don’t have time to analyse the short-term and long-term effects of such drugs. With an almost incredible disregard for their health, clubbers are happily swallowing pills with names like Roflcopter before anyone knows exactly what’s in them – apart, of course, from the rogue chemists who have just cooked them up.
Government scientists are scrambling desperately to classify these drugs and warn young people of the dangers of taking them. But the underground laboratories, and their new digital sales departments, are too far ahead. It’s a lost cause.
In any case, declaring war on drugs is a rather old-fashioned thing to do these days. When young people get wasted, it’s not just on drugs but on drugs, alcohol, whatever. The hedonic experience involves whatever you can get your hands on or whatever feels right at the time. Many binges involve planned sequences of drinks and drugs that are intended to sketch the trajectory of their experience. We may never reach the stage where, after dropping a bottle of vodka into the supermarket trolley, a clubber thinks, ‘Oh, mustn’t forget the MDMA,’ and reaches up for a packet. But the stuff is only a phone call away, so what’s the difference?