Top beer writer, Pete Brown has revisited the statistics about children and young people drinking. It's another 'must read' (although sadly they won't bother) for the public health crowd. Here's a sample:
Now the decline is so steep, and so sustained, that there's no getting away from it. Last week's headlines were unequivocal - under-age drinking is no longer cool:
- 39% of pupils said they had drunk alcohol at least once. This continues the downward trend since 2003, when 61% of pupils had drunk alcohol, and is lower than at any time since 1988, when the survey first measured the prevalence of drinking in this age group.
- 9% of pupils had drunk alcohol in the last week. This proportion has fallen from 25% in 2003.
Bouyed by this undoubted good news, the Portman Group undertook some research among parents of school-age children to learn if they were aware of the fact that their children are not drinking.Unsurprisingly given the media coverage the issue receives, 9 out of 10 parents had no idea about the 34% decrease in children who have drunk alcohol. The same proportion were similarly unaware of the 33% decrease in the number of kids who think it is OK to drink alcohol on a weekly basis.
We have (heaven knows how) spawned the most sober and sensible of generations and Pete Brown is right - a great deal of the credit goes to the drinks industry itself. Sadly, the prohibitionists and denormalisers won't have it that way regardless of the evidence.
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1 comment:
Pete Brown is a good writer when he isn't using his blog to take cheap, ill-informed pot shots at UKIP.
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