It was once the curse of the working classes, but these days it seems it’s their bourgeois cousins who are developing an unhealthy relationship with drink.
To some it may come as a surprise, given that a better education, for example, could be said to aid informed decisions.
But Lucy Roca, who struggled for years with a alcohol problem, knows the truth: clever people don’t always make clever choices, they’re just good at coming up with clever excuses.
I blame this in part on our modern prohibition lite policy of no drinking until your 21. Most people learn the social habits of their later years when they are young men and women. Since alcohol is illegal for people under 21, and therefor it is the forbidden fruit so to speak, people are learning to drink at underground parties without responsible people around to tell them they have had enough or they are acting like buffoons.
This country had almost no incidence of alcoholism among women… until the 18th Amendment was passed. The incidence of male alcoholism actually rose during Prohibition! But we just never learn from history.
It also helps if from an early age the consumption of alcohol is associated with food and the conversation that accompanies it, something that Mediterranean cultures seem to accomplish better than those of Northern Europe and North America.
My parents never encouraged their children to drink but nor did they set it up as something forbidden. I drank wine and cider in moderation as a teenager and went off to university with not the slightest desire to binge drink.