Alcohol

So the government plan to raise the price of alcohol and ban the concept of the happy hour in order to reverse the binge drinking epidemic that seems to be sweeping the country. Most high streets here are pretty unpleasant at night, especially at weekends when mostly young folk leave the clubs and bars. Drunken kids can be quite amusing but en masse they can also be very volatile and threatening. They are also very vulnerable and obviously are doing themselves no good at all.
This is where I go on about how different things were in my day. Well frankly they weren't that different. Alcohol was probably in relative terms as accessible as it is now, and as a young man I also abused it as often as i could afford to.
When I lived at home things were different. To come home smelling of alcohol was a dangerous thing to do. My father, who became more of an alcoholic as he got older, would have beaten us had he got a hint of that, and so I was a late developer, waiting until I had escaped home and gone to college. The rest is history I suppose, and yes I must have been almost as obnoxious as some of the kids are today, though I have never been violent and never deliberately got involved in vandalism.
I hold my hand up to the fact that I do like to drink. A bottle of red wine has an almost irresistable pull, especially of an evening, and it is a lot cheaper than going out. Alas there are days when that one bottle leads to a second and even rarer days when the brandy bottle seems to find its way into my hand. I do have days when i don't drink at all but they are few and far between. Oddly, i don't particularly crave alcohol, and I can easily do without it but I know that it is becoming a habit. Would the propose price increase make any difference to me? I really doubt it and I feel that would be the same for most people. Those that binge today will also binge tomorrow. Some will grow out of it and others will make a career out of it and probably not live to an age where they are old enough to know better. Perhaps natural selection is still at work.