Hard to Believe

Wow! The Guardian has an article on binge drinking that seems to be talking sense (or, I admit, roughly aligns with my own prejudices).

This is top-to-bottom nonsense. Binge drinking has a medical definition: it starts at four units in a session for a woman, or five units in a session for a man. It isn't "ending up in A&E". It's half a bottle of wine watching Scrubs. And everybody in the government knows this, they just insist upon vagueness so as not to be pulled up on what has actually happened.

There's also an excellent point on boozed up kids turning city centers in to no-go areas at midnight:

A lot was made on the Today programme of the plight of the sober, who after 11pm can no longer go into city centres, which are full of maniacs. But why would a sober person want to perambulate through Nottingham at midnight anyway? This is like complaining that discos are full of single people trying to get off with each other, leaving married people practically barred from nightclubs.

Here's the thing. This article is actually looking at what the Government says rather than just repeating it. Somebody on the paper has finally gone "four units? I can drink that before the spagetti's al dente, that's not a binge". I can see how this will be the exception that proves the rule, though. The glimmer of hope is that this does seem to tie in to an idea that we've been Nannied to much by our state and that if the government would treat us a bit more like responsible adults capable of making their own decisions, well, then, maybe we'd start acting that way.

Now, I think the time for paternalistic government, protecting its blessed charges, has passed. I don't think more stringent controls on drinkers make sense - the factors motivating drunkenness, or rather militating against a mature, long-term attitude to consumption and wellbeing, are vast and global and complicated.