High Sobriety (18 page)

Slowly, Gran started to improve. ‘One day I walked in and Mum was smiling. I burst into tears because I knew I had my mum back. She looked at me and said, “I know it's corny, but today is the first day of the rest of my life.” Of course, there was worse to come, but we believed it at the time.' The doctors wouldn't discharge Gran from hospital into the care of the man they believed was aggravating her condition, so she came to stay with us for a while. Then she moved to be with Mum's older sister Kitty, in Stockport, just outside of Manchester. Granddad moved to Inverness, and they sold their Edinburgh flat. But Gran pined for her husband. It wasn't long before she went back to him, heading north to Inverness, to what Mum describes as a ‘poky wee flat'. ‘He'd be out drinking and she'd just sit in front of the fire. She was miserable. He was a good man. He loved her so much; he loved her to bits. He'd stop drinking and I'd pray, I would literally pray, that this would be it. That he'd stop. But he always went back.'

Gran's health gradually began to deteriorate again. Eventually, she required constant care and was moved to a nursing home. She died on 6 January 1992. ‘Granddad really just carried on as before. He did try to moderate his drinking, but he missed her so much that he found it almost impossible. I visited him a few times, and he was always so happy to see me, but I knew that nothing I did would change him because he really did not want to stop drinking. He did not acknowledge that he had a problem, and eventually he died.' That was on 20 August 1999.

Mum's worn out by the time she's finished. We're both in tears. The decisions she had to make to help look after the people who raised her are unimaginable. That she was able to function while coping with that trauma, let alone maintain a marriage and care for two children, ensuring that they had a normal life, fills me with a love for her that no words can explain fully. And at the heart of that tragedy: alcohol. A drug I have enjoyed with cavalier abandon simply because it's legal.

I GO FOR
a night out with Fiona and Lisa, my oldest and dearest friends. We've been pals since primary school. This time, without alcohol, it's different. It's better. It's wonderful to catch up on their news.

After dinner, we weigh up where to go next. A pub? A nightclub? But all we really want to do is talk. I drive us back to Fiona's house and, while they drink wine, I sip peppermint tea. We chat until well past 2.00 a.m. These are the memories that will keep me warm in my old age.

We talk about drinking, too. That's been happening a lot lately. My sobriety, already old-hat in Melbourne, sparks new conversations here — not the usual, ‘You were so pished last night!' war stories, but a real conversation, about how much we drink, why we drink, and how Scotland is a nation with a drinking problem. Granddad's story is not uncommon: nearly everyone knows someone who has struggled with alcoholism, whether it's a neighbour, a relative, a colleague, or a friend. I'm amazed at how common these tales are, and wonder if it's always been this way and we've just never talked about it, or if I've been too busy getting drunk to notice.

The next morning I hear Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, interviewed on radio about Gerry Rafferty, the singer-songwriter who wrote ‘Baker Street' and ‘Stuck in the Middle with You'. Rafferty died in January from liver failure, after decades of heavy drinking. Salmond talks about Rafferty's ‘enormous talent', and adds, ‘Unfortunately, like many people in Scotland, he fell victim to the bottle.' It's a throwaway line, but it says so much. Scots poetise alcohol, turning it into a predator poised to devour the unwitting; the ‘demon drink' can be our mortal enemy, but also our closest friend. Our national bard, Robert Burns, thought to have died from complications related to excessive drinking, wrote the epic ‘Tam o' Shanter', a gothic tale of a man who spends too long at a public house and is plagued by nightmarish visions on his way home. But it's his many poems celebrating alcohol, including one that posits ‘freedom an' whisky gang thegither', that we cling to most as proof that our tradition and cultural identity are inextricably linked to booze.

On a radio phone-in the day after the interview with Alex Salmond, the topic is the nation's record of sporting failure. The presenter asks what Olympic sport Scotland would win gold in; the resounding response from callers is, of course, drinking. The host laughs and makes a quip about our legendary boozing reputation. But Scotland's unenviable title of the sick man of Europe is no joke. In the country responsible for the deep-fried Mars Bar, obesity and heart-disease rates are soaring. Smoking is not yet out of fashion, with 27 per cent of men hooked, compared to 21 per cent in the rest of the United Kingdom, and 18 per cent in Australia. Life expectancy in Scotland is two years fewer than in Great Britain's other home nations. But the most insidious killer of all is booze: 15 of the 20 areas in the United Kingdom with the highest number of alcohol-related deaths are in Scotland. In some parts of Glasgow, men are lucky if they live beyond their fifties. Over the last two decades, liver-cirrhosis rates have increased by 450 per cent, at a time when rates in most of Western Europe have been falling. A recent analysis of alcohol sales found that the average Scottish adult is knocking back the equivalent of 46 bottles of vodka every year. If health experts in Australia are worried about the binge-drinking culture Down Under, they should take a trip to Scotland to see how much worse things could be. The population is four times smaller than Australia's, but every year the same number of people — more than 3000 — die from booze-related causes. As a race, we are drinking ourselves to death.

Public concern is so heightened that the once-sacred tradition of happy hour has been banned in Scottish pubs. Buy-one-get-one-free deals in off-licences have also been outlawed. And in a sign that the party truly is over, Scotland looks set to become the first country in Europe to introduce a minimum price for alcohol. A bill to be put before the Scottish Parliament in 2012 aims to end systemic discounting, which has allowed retailers to sell a bottle of cider more cheaply than a bottle of water. It will mean that a unit of alcohol cannot be sold below a set price (thought to be around 45 pence) and will make stronger drinks, associated with heavy drinking, less affordable. Announcing the legislation, health secretary Nicola Sturgeon vowed, ‘It is time for Scotland to win its battle with the booze.'
*

*The Scottish Parliament passed the Alcohol (Minimum Pricing) Bill in May 2012, setting the minimum price for a unit of alcohol at 50 pence, meaning that the cheapest bottle of wine would be £4.69 and a four-pack of lager would cost at least £3.52. The law is set to come into force in April 2013, but the Scotch Whisky Association and the European Spirits Organisation have been granted judicial review of the legislation, after claiming it breaches EU trade rules.

I arrange to meet a woman on the front lines of this battle. Evelyn Gillan is the head of Alcohol Focus Scotland, a charity set up to reduce alcohol harm and create a culture where moderate drinking is the norm. It's a daunting task in a country with whisky as one of its most lucrative exports, contributing £3 billion a year to the national economy. But when we catch up for coffee in Edinburgh's New Town, I realise that if you're going to fight a war, you'd want Evelyn Gillan in your corner. She speaks quickly, in urgent tones, with a broad Scots accent. Immaculately dressed and with her hair in a neat bob, she doesn't look much like a warrior — but make no mistake, she's locked in combat. Her enemy: the alcohol industry. When she describes the industry as ‘disease vectors', I laugh. She doesn't. ‘Seriously, it's a hazardous, harmful product. It's a drug, and we've allowed the producers of that hazardous product unfettered access to young people. Now we're concerned when we see 12-year-olds being hospitalised on a Friday night. Why should we be surprised, when we actually look at what we've allowed to happen over the last 30 years?'

Just as Robin Room argues that a reputation for binge drinking is part of Australia's national myth, fuelled partly by market forces, Gillan says Scotland's drinking problem is a corporate-born epidemic. Alcohol consumption in the 1960s was relatively low, around five litres of alcohol per person over the age of 15 per year. Today, it's more than 12 litres. ‘Increasingly, we have to name and identify the role of the big multinationals in fuelling this epidemic, instead of just saying, “It's our culture — we all love our drink.” That's not happened by accident. There's very specific action that's been taken with deregulation, liberalisation, proliferation of new alcohol products, and massive spends on advertising.' Gillan says that booze has, since the 1970s, become cheaper, more heavily marketed, and more readily available. ‘When I was young, you couldn't afford to drink at home. A litre bottle of vodka was the equivalent of £35. If you had anything in the house, it was for New Year's Eve. At the supermarket, alcohol and tobacco used to be screened off behind a separate section. There's been a big push by the industry to make alcohol an ordinary commodity, and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.'

There's a quiet fury beneath her words. She talks about the need to ‘protect' young people from the ‘normalisation' of drinking, led by an industry bombarding them with alcohol advertising at sporting events, at music festivals, and, increasingly, through social media, where there are no restrictions on how to market alcohol products. She says that not only is this type of viral marketing big bang for the industry buck, but also that Facebook or Bebo groups which promote funky new drinks create a sense of belonging in an audience desperate for peer acceptance. Young people are much more likely to pay attention to brand messages if the recommendation comes directly from their friends.

Internal marketing documents from British beer giant Carling, obtained during a 2009 House of Commons Health Select Committee inquiry into alcohol advertising, revealed that the purpose of the company's sponsorship of music festivals was to ‘build the image of the brand and recruit young male drinkers'. The document stated: ‘More people are attending live music than ever before. FACT. Which is great for Carling as beer and live music go hand in hand. FACT.' The company sought to make Carling ‘the first choice for festival virgins', and enhanced its brand during the event through a range of promotions, including handing out free tents, and offering a campsite morning-delivery service of a can of Carling and a newspaper. ‘Great way to start the day!' the documents stated.

This form of insidious marketing, Gillan says, is a powerful way to attract new drinkers. ‘What we're trying to do is turn that around and start protecting people from alcohol marketing, and empowering young people — like the tobacco-truth campaigns, where once young people have got access to information about how the industry is trying to manipulate them and dupe them, they say, “I don't think so.”' Gillan says that she wasn't always this combative. But as the industry fights moves towards regulation — particularly minimum price, which alcohol companies claim won't reduce problem drinking and will penalise the majority of Scots, who drink responsibly — she's been forced to defend herself. ‘I've had personal attacks. I've been called a neo-prohibitionist. I think my current nickname within the industry is Dr Evil Glam. I've been shouted at in rooms. If they can't win the argument, they attack the organisation. The industry is fantastically organised; very successful lobbyists. It's a David-and-Goliath battle.'

As an example, she cites the Scotch Whisky Association, one of the most vocal opponents of minimum price legislation, which has appealed to national sentiment by claiming that Scotland's most iconic export will be threatened by the move. But the group is not what it seems. Far from being a collective of local distilleries fighting for Scottish jobs, its 56 members include some of the world's largest multinational alcohol companies. It was until recently chaired by Diageo, a global spirits giant that produces brands such as Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker, and Baileys. Gillan claims that the industry is fundamentally opposed to any moves to reduce consumption because if people drink less, these companies make less money.

The influence of the multinationals' massive marketing spend, says Gillan, is contributing to a shift in the way young people are drinking in parts of Europe that have, until recently, not seen the alcohol-related social consequences felt so keenly in the United Kingdom and Australia. In France, Spain, and Italy, where historically alcohol was drunk in the Mediterranean tradition, mainly with food, more young people are now drinking recreationally. ‘They're drinking branded beers and spirits that were never associated with their cultures. Again, the industry's got massive presences in these countries. What the public-health people are saying is that if you go to Madrid or other main cities, that's where you start to see major public drunkenness for the first time. It will be sad if it goes that way because the way they traditionally drink just shows you that it's possible to create a culture where people don't think it's cool to be plastered.'

I'm reminded of an evening with Kath, during our jaunt around Europe last year. We were in a bar in Venice, watching Germany and Spain in the World Cup semi-final. After the game, hundreds of young people spilled out of bars and restaurants, and we found ourselves sitting at the foot of some steps in a piazza, drinking bottled beer and people-watching. Some were drinking; many were not. What struck me was how convivial the atmosphere was. The throng grew, and there was a bit of jostling as people pushed to get through the crowd. But there was no trouble. I've spent a lot of time in the city centres of Melbourne and Edinburgh on Friday and Saturday nights, and there's always that underlying threat of menace. It's a tinderbox just waiting for a match. But in Venice, I felt completely safe. The difference, I think, is that their drinking seemed to be incidental. Ours is often the whole point of the evening.