'Binge drinking' and the binge economy
‘Gluttony is not a secret vice’
Orson Welles
In recent years, an extraordinary amount of UK political and media attention has focused on alcohol consumption and its impact on public order and health. But despite the quasimedical connotations of the term ‘binge drinking’, with daily limits measured in units of alcohol, the precise definition is disputed: one Home Office publication defines a binge drinker as someone who reports ‘feeling very drunk once a month’ (Richardson and Budd, 2003), while a clinical definition describes drinking over a day or more until unconscious (Newburn and Shiner, 2001).
The government’s definition is someone who drinks twice the recommended daily amount at least once a week; for men, that’s a maximum of four units; for women, a maximum of three.This means that a man who has three pints of premium lager during one, perhaps quite long, night out is, officially, a binge drinker. Similarly, a woman who drinks three (standard) glasses of wine in one night is on a binge.
Yet beyond the realm of public health professionals and campaigners, the term is rarely used to describe the drinking habits of anyone other than young denizens of the ‘night-time economy’. Binge drinking is seldom linked with alcohol-related diseases, with accidents in the home or with domestic violence. Indeed, since publication of the government’s alcohol strategy (Strategy Unit, 2004), where a binge drinker is described as someone who drinks to get drunk, the term has become a remarkably pliant device to implicate individuals perhaps more accurately described as ‘young people drunk and disorderly in public places’.
As such, binge drinkers are indispensable folk devils for the new millennium. They are noisy, urinate in public and are frequently violent.This brings them into conflict with an undermanned police force, which can be depicted on most nights of the week wrestling heroically with foul-mouthed, vomit-stained youths in an attempt to restore the city centre to daytime levels of comportment.
These stage-managed battles between the representatives of the state and violent youth make great copy for lazy TV journalists who in previous eras were obliged to set up their cameras at football grounds or seaside promenades on bank holiday weekends to be guaranteed visceral footage of young people fighting.
Dick Hobbs