Culture shock

The on-going furore over "binge-drinking" is not doing the trade any favours. But we must try to change drinking habits. By Phil Mellows.

Chairman Tim Martin's internal memo to all JD Wetherspoon staff on the company's policies on binge-drinking, released to the trade press this week, again highlighted an issue that is increasingly bothering the pub industry - as if it needed any more highlighting.

Several months ago The Publican's editorial team decided to avoid using the term "binge-drinking" - it was emotive and unhelpful, we thought. But its persistent appearance in the mainstream media has made it impossible to keep to the decision. "Binge-drinking" has quickly become rooted in the English language.

Are we all agreed on what it means, though? A long article in the New Scientist magazine on August 21 promised to provide a definitive answer. After all, it did have the word "scientist" in the title.

Sure enough it declared that "earlier this year the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism finally agreed on a formal definition for the behaviour".

"A 'binge' is a pattern of drinking that brings blood alcohol concentration to 0.08 per cent or above."

Curiously, this is exactly the same as the UK drink-drive limit - 80 milligrams of alcohol in every 100 millilitres of blood. Are people who sensibly refuse a second glass of wine at dinner so they can drive home going to refuse a second even when they're not driving, for fear of being accused of binge-drinking?

Something is plainly awry here. The problem is the term binge-drinking has been bandied about by the media - and then picked up by certain politicians - years before a "binge" was quantified.

A "binge", once vaguely defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a drinking bout", has now been scientifically narrowed down to behaviour that can hardly be described as bingeing. But it's too late. Everyone over the drink-drive limit is now a binge-drinker. The definition will bounce back on society, the binge-drinking problem will statistically spiral upwards without anything actually changing in reality. Worrying, isn't it?

Nobody is saying that it's a wonderful thing to see young people rampaging through the streets, being sick and bumping into lampposts. To tell the truth, there's a part of me that thinks young people have always done that and they will, equally inevitably, grow up and out of it. Agreed, though, it's not nice and there is probably something we can do to modify and manipulate Britain's drinking culture to mitigate the excesses. Certainly, since the government has bound up licensing reform quite explicitly with law and order there is an urgency on the licensed trade to make every effort to put its house in order.

There is a lobby inside and outside the Home Office which believes availability - or rather lack of it - is the key to reducing alcohol misuse. That implies shorter not longer hours and even more restrictions and regulations. So it's in the interests of the trade to strongly propose alternatives and make them work.

Tim Martin has, typically, taken the initiative with his memo, the point of which, we might take it, is as much to publicly announce Wetherspoon's responsible attitude as to educate his staff.

Although they have attracted a bad reputation on the high street, Tim points out his pubs do not deal in two-for-one or all-you-can-drink offers. They do, however, have reasonably priced soft drinks and all-day food, and the managers and staff are among the best-trained in the business. These measures are all easily identifiable. More interestingly, Tim points to the mix of customers his pubs aim to attract - women as well as men, old as well as young. Many high street venues may protest that's not what they are about but it's true that some kind of social self-policing is lost when pubs and bars aggressively segment themselves to focus on one part of the market. And everyone can do something about the quality of the environment which, as Tim suggests, "can have a subconscious effect on the behaviour of customers".

In short, there's more to keeping order than having bouncers. As you can read on the following page, Yates Group and other high street operators have introduced "premium" pool lounges to their pubs in an apparently successful attempt to calm the edgy atmosphere that often surrounds the game.

Alongside these kind of approaches, however, we need to put the nonsense about binge-drinking into perspective.

The "bingeing" behaviour of drinkers, especially younger people, has been hitting the headlines all summer - but is it really anything new?