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05/26/2008: "A desperate new generation driven to drink"

Britons drink so much that we now have children admitted to hospital with liver disease. According to a survey by the Office for National Statistics, more 13-year-olds have drunk alcohol than not that's 350,000 13-year-old drinkers in England and Wales alone; I don't expect the figures for Scotland especially buck the trend.

The week before last a 25% rise in crime over three years by girls aged between 10 and 17 was blamed on ladette culture and underage drinking (I don't know why they bother to differentiate: ladette culture is underage drinking).

"The relentless rise in [hospital] admissions involving more and more young people is very bad news," said Professor Roger Williams, a liver specialist at University College London, who added that he and his colleagues were treating people in their twenties and thirties for liver failure and cirrhosis.

The proposed solution shops and supermarkets facing legal curbs on the sale of cut-price alcohol has its heart in the right place, but I don't see how it would really address what has become a problem of epidemic proportions. If people whose definition of enjoyment is drinking can no longer buy cheap booze, they start concocting their own and end up drinking meths or whatever its modern equivalents might be.

[ Curb the subhumans - it's the only solution! ]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/india_knight/article3998870.ece