yeh. something must be done. why not lop off the politicians' heads, it would make more sense.
i wouldn't be allowed on the grounds of the local golf club
i hope you have a good weekend mr mugabe
you know they define a binge as three pints or thereabouts?
Nope didn't know it had a specific meaning apart from loads and not every day.
Pretty much never knowingly unbinged then, me. And I wouldn't call myself a big
Me too though more a couple of pints of water after I got in, which sort of worked but not as well.
Consumption of alcohol may have been falling in recent years but it's still well over double what people drank in the 50s, and looking at the overall figure doesn't necessarily tell you much about those people who are drinking at risky levels.
I think the theory is not that it stops addicts drinking, but they will generally drink a bit less without such a plentiful supply of very cheap booze. There's a difference between what an alcoholic might need to drink as maintenance to prevent withdrawal taking place and what they might drink on a proper binge.
Depends what figures you look at but looks like they drink 20-30% less than the UK.
They didn't ration alcohol. It may well be that it was relatively more expensive though, which could kind of prove the point that price does make a difference.
Overall alcohol consumption rates don't appear to be very correlated to alcohol tax levels internationally. Looking at the list of countries' overall consumption, you have high-tax and low-tax countries mixed together, suggesting that tax levels don't affect overall drinking rates that much. For instance, the UK slots in just above three European countries with much lower alcohol tax, Belgium, Spain and Bulgaria. These figures don't capture the levels of problem drinking, of course.
A person's overall wealth makes a difference - we still see that with the drinking levels now, which go up as you go up the wealth scale. There was certainly less disposable income in the 1950s. Also, women used not to drink anywhere near as much as men. Now they do. Since the 1950s, we've developed a taste for wine and also lager, which is significantly stronger than most of the ales that used to be drunk. And drinking at home has increased.
I was just reading an article on the ONS website which talks about this - they say this difference is because women tend to both earn less and drink less than men, so it skews the figures.
Why any decade? The twentieth century pattern is that alcohol per capita was higher than now in 1900, but plummeted for obvious reasons post WW1, and fluctuated at a pretty low level until the 1960s when it began to climb, reaching a peak in the early 2000s.
