Why has binge drinking become such a problem?
The answer clearly lies in that mysterious item: fashion.
There is hardly ever any simple reason why a fashion gets going. Who knows what makes everyone suddenly think that mini skirts are in or out?
These fashions can, of course, be about matters of life and death. A few decades back, it was commonplace for reasonable and decent people to think nothing of having a few drinks before driving. Nowadays, we think of this as a pretty murderous activity.
The fashion has changed so far as drink-driving is concerned, and there are people living today who would be dead if the fashion hadn’t changed.
This example of drink driving is highly relevant to the question of binge drinking amongst the young. It wasn’t just breathalysers that changed public attitudes to people having “one for the road”. Change in the law without a change in the fashion would certainly not have brought about anything like the shift in behaviour that we have all witnessed.
In much the same way, we need to combine changes in the law with subtle ways of nudging people into changing behaviour if we really want to put a brake on binge drinking.
The legal side of this is fairly clear. A good start would be to ban the sale of below cost drinks in supermarkets, and to raise the tax on the particularly strong drinks which are most used by binge drinkers.
The difficult bit is to find a clever way of nudging young people into thinking that getting blind drunk on a Friday night is not cool.
This requires a huge imaginative effort – because just preaching at people won’t do the trick. There is no substitute, here, for experimentation. One really can’t tell in advance what will work – and one just has to try a series of different things in the hope that some of them will begin to shift the fashion.
A psychological experiment recently showed that when hotels put notices in their bathrooms asking their guests not to steal the bathrobes, it had no effect; but when the hoteliers put notices saying that “guests in this hotel who want to take a bathrobe home almost always buy one at reception”, that did the trick.
The question is: what is the equivalent of the bathrobe notice in this case?