'It's barely an exaggeration to say that Western civilisation was founded on alcohol.'
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With this arresting statement, Mike Jay, author of the fascinating book Emperors of Dreams, opens an illuminating discussion of the 'temperance and prohibition' movements in America and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1).
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His observations that Classical Greece and Rome were both 'drinking cultures' and that wine and beer were 'deeply embedded in classical notions of civilisation' stand in marked contrast to the current tendency to regard alcohol only as a source of disease and danger.
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In mid-February 2001, a survey of the consumption of 'alcohol and other drugs' by European schoolchildren - purporting to show Britain's youth heading the league tables of abuse - prompted newspaper and TV accounts of the evils of binge-drinking and other forms of excess (2). A report from the World Health Organisation claimed that binge-drinking was a global epidemic, contributing to a rising tide of deaths from violence, crime and accidents as well as from liver disease.
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Also in mid-February UK prime minister Tony Blair announced a crackdown on drug dealers, proposing a series of measures including a register of all convicted dealers. UK home secretary Jack Straw followed up Blair's initiative with proposals for special 'drugs courts' - based on the American model - in which specially trained magistrates will have powers to enforce anybody convicted of drugs-related offences to undergo strict treatment regimes. While employers are expanding the scope of testing for drugs and alcohol in the workplace, the prisons are filling up - in Britain as in America - with drug offenders.
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There are both striking parallels and important differences between the contemporary war on drink and drugs and the old temperance crusade. Temperance was inspired by evangelical Christianity and puritanical moralism. In the USA, it embodied a strongly conservative and anti-immigrant outlook (Germans, Scandinavians, Italians and Irish all came from 'drinking cultures'). In Britain, it was more a vehicle for imposing middle-class values on the proletariat, consolidating a division between the 'respectable' and the 'rough' that helped to contain incipient revolt.
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In both Britain and the USA, the old temperance crusade was censorious, intolerant, and conducive to measures of state regulation (such as licensing hours) and repression (such as the prohibition of alcohol in the USA between 1920 and 1932). The results of this measure are familiar: a long-term increase in alcohol consumption and the growth of organised crime, leading to large-scale violence and corruption.
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The modern form of temperance has a wider target, taking in drugs and tobacco as well as the demon drink. The medical model has largely supplanted the role of religion; the goal of health replaces that of virtue as the preservation of the body has become more important than saving the soul. The Salvation Army has given way to pressure groups like Alcohol Concern, which organise press conferences rather than revival meetings. Though they have abandoned both the brass band and the military uniform, today's campaigners are adept at using the mass media to transmit their message.
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The survey is a key propaganda device of the new temperance campaigners. It is a measure of how servile the media have become that, from the tabloids to the broadsheets, the results of a survey based on asking teenagers to report their participation in a range of illicit activities are taken at face value.
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 | | The preservation of the body has become more important than saving the soul |
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Everybody who has ever been a teenager or has ever had any contact with teenagers - that is, everybody apart from temperance campaigners and certain journalists - knows that you cannot believe a word they say on these subjects. While some will be bragging, others will be in denial; some will be telling the interviewer what they think they expect to hear, others will be having a laugh at their expense. The only value of these surveys is in providing statistical legitimacy for the prejudices of the agencies that commission them.
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The report from a prestigious international agency is another valuable propaganda tool. The interesting feature of the WHO report that featured under last week's lurid headlines was that the figures it presented did not support the spin given by the WHO officials - and dutifully followed by the press. A glance at the table printed in the Guardian under the sub-heading 'A decade of drinking' (the overall headline is 'Binge-drinking: Britain's new epidemic') reveals that alcohol consumption per head of population has fallen slightly over the past decade (it does not indicate that it fell even faster in the 1980s).
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Furthermore, the report shows that deaths by homicide, suicide or injury linked to alcohol fell over the 1990s by 15 percent, and that deaths in alcohol-related road accidents fell by 21 percent in the same period. There was a 47 percent increase in deaths from liver disease, but this was from a low level - and it remains far behind European levels.
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What emerges from these reports is the fact that an influential body of opinion - well represented in the ranks of the New Labour government, in the medical profession and the media - is concerned about its lack of influence over young people. From the perspective of the British establishment, the inclination of young people to experiment with alcohol and drugs and other forbidden pleasures is profoundly threatening. (Whether or not the perception that young people are more inclined to such activities is accurate is both impossible to say, and not of critical importance.) The anxieties expressed in the discussion of these issues reflect the insecurities of British adults more than the inadequacies of their children.
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The real danger arises from the measures that follow from the promotion of the myth that the nation's youth is in the grip of an epidemic of alcoholism and drug addiction. Young people are being bombarded with patronising and stupefying 'education', informing them that such activities are bad for their health. The universal experience of such campaigns in the USA is that they are not merely ineffective, but counterproductive, provoking teenage interest in forbidden fruit. If a war on alcohol now links up with the war on drugs, further restrictions on civil liberties - like random testing of employees or people arrested by the police - are likely.
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The appearance last week of a poster campaign announcing a clampdown on cigarette smuggling revealed an ominous trend. Attempts to prohibit smoking - by price as well as other restrictions - have created a lucrative black market in which criminal gangs meet the demands of defiant consumers. Such markets already exist in illicit drugs and, to a lesser extent, in alcohol rackets across the English Channel.
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Further outbursts of New Labour moralism in the election period are likely to encourage a descent into a spiral of temperance and prohibition, repression and criminalisation, which will - as in the past - prove much more damaging to civilisation than alcohol or drugs.
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Dr Michael Fitzpatrick is the author of MMR and Autism, Routledge, 2004 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); and The Tyranny of Health: Doctors and the Regulation of Lifestyle, Routledge, 2000 (buy this book from Amazon UK or Amazon USA). He is also a contributor to Alternative Medicine: Should We Swallow It? Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
(1) Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century, Mike Jay, Dedalus 2000, p222
(2) The 1999 'European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs'
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