Wasted (21 page)

While the Guinness brewing operation stretches back 250 years, Dr Luke points to the fact that the Irish have always had a relationship with mind- and mood-altering substances long before the
Guinness family got in on the act.

‘Our remedies seem to be mushrooms and alcohol and those are the truly ancient intoxicants. I often joke that the reason we have such fabulous Celtic mythology is because of fabulous
Celtic mushrooms! That’s partly humorous, but I’m certain psychadelia has a role to play in Celtic mythology and Celtic culture and designs and much of that has come from mushrooms.
Similarly with alcohol, we have had alcohol since the dawn of time, with mead and beer and cider, so I mean it’s utterly natural.’

The difference nowadays, he says, is in concentration of alcohol in products and in the range available. ‘Fast forward the last five hundred to one thousand years of globalisation, which
really means the conquistadors and the taking over of the American wilderness and the taking over of Australia. In tandem with that has been the taking back of exotic fruits and drugs. By the time
we get to [the] year 2000, at the peak of the Celtic Tiger, the population who are well used to mushrooms and drink suddenly have access to all this exotic range of intoxicants and also have the
money to afford it. What we have is the native natural alcohol consumption suddenly multiplied by increasing concentration of the alcohol. In addition to that, you have the consumption of other
drugs that are relatively new to our culture.’

In terms of concentration, while Guinness may buck the trend by offering lower-strength ranges, the general trend over the last two decades has been for higher concentrations of alcohol in the
majority of products. ‘What happened is that in the last twenty years we have seen an increase in the concentration—a doubling, effectively. It’s very difficult now to go into any
shop and to get less than fourteen per cent alcohol in a bottle of wine, for example. That’s a fact, so in a sense, drugs fuelled drink consumption and drink fuels drug consumption and
that’s what’s new. So you have both a diversity and scale which is new and that’s where I come in. The impact on the Emergency department is really [astonishing] if you look at it
very carefully. My own feeling is that many attendances to
A&E
departments are fuelled by drink and drugs. Nearly one third of the population of Ireland attend an
A&E
department every year, which is good reason for investing in them, and we’re talking in excess of 1.25 million people. I’m convinced that more than fifty
per cent come to hospital urgently, suddenly, unexpectedly, because of drink- or drug-fuelled mishap or ailment. I’m also including tobacco. I’m talking about shots of alcohol, which
are extraordinarily strong compared to what they were twenty or thirty years ago. I’m talking about drink-fuelled consumption of cocaine. I’m talking about the misuse of marginally
legal drugs from head shops. I’m talking about the misuse of over-the-counter drugs, inappropriate prescriptions of drugs by doctors. If you put it all together, I’m certain that it
adds up to the majority of our patients. So it’s quite an extraordinary figure and the bottom line is that this all results from, in my view, an increase in concentration of alcohol, not the
volume.’

Dr Luke points out that alcohol consumption levels have been moving upwards since the late 1950 or 1960s, as the Irish economy has gone through economic and social changes and improvements.
‘In the last fifteen years, we have seen a normalisation of intoxication of both . . . genders,’ he says. ‘Women are now beginning to overtake men in terms of binge-drinking and
liver failure and young girls are beginning to overtake teenage boys in terms of premature presentations.’ He notes that companies like Diageo have been saying consumption has stabilised and
says he’s ‘optimistic our dwindling prosperity will bring some kind of dip in the overall volume consumed’. He seems to be agreeing with the drinks industry—that a
comprehensive, multifaceted approach to the issue of problem drinking in Ireland is what is needed. ‘My main concern is the numbers, rather than the style or morality or philosophical issues.
Ultimately, it’s figures we need to think about, and my own feeling is that we should really try to define or describe the scale of the problem numerically. I really think that police should
screen for alcohol or cannabis or cocaine in anybody that has been arrested for violence or disorder. I really think we have to measure alcohol measures in almost every patient for a period of time
until we get some sort of idea.’

In terms of our drinking habits, the industry has a huge role to play in lowering the
ABV
levels. ‘I don’t think we should worry about volume; I think we
should stop concentrating. What I mean by that is that the shots culture is the embodiment of catastrophic concentration. So you’re moving from Babycham, light ales, Indian ales and little
sherries of the 1970s and 1960s, to these high concentrations of alcohol with forty per cent and fifty per cent which are actually lethal.’

Dr Luke says his ambition over the next 20 years would be to see wine dropping back towards 7 per cent and 8 per cent
ABV
and beer dropping back towards 3 per cent and 4
per cent.

‘That means that we can return to the ancient order of pub culture, which worked so well for so many years in Ireland. Paradoxically I think that pubs have a lot to offer in terms of
stabilising our culture. Going to the pub in Ireland in the 1970s it was perfectly possible to go to a snug and sit chatting for hours and hours and hours while nursing just half a pint of beer.
Because that’s all you could afford. There is nothing inherently impossible about nursing half a pint of shandy, even, for hours at a time. The atmosphere in the pubs has been so altered by
the Celtic Tiger, particularly, that the atmosphere is often hostile or menacing and not conducive to conversation. I yearn for the days when we can revive our oral tradition, because that is what
was great about Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. It was about conversation and comedy and creativity and that, to me, is what craic was. It was obviously lubricated to some extent by libation, but
it was fundamentally about conversation.’

——

The decline of the bar trade is therefore a cause for concern, not just for the drinks industry and health professionals, but also for wider society. Diageo company
representatives had pointed out that off-trade or at-home drinking is not regulated in any regard, while ‘on-premise’ consumption is very highly regulated. The move from pub to at-home
drinking has also had repercussions for another sector of the drinks industry, often seen as the whipping boys for the ills of Ireland’s association with alcohol. I’m talking, of
course, about nightclubs.

The clubbing scene gathered pace in the 1970s and 1980s, but really came into its own commercially in the 1990s, with the rise of the dance scene and new drugs such as Ecstasy. In the days
before late-night bar licences, a proper night out wasn’t complete without a visit to a club. Dr Luke has studied the club culture, and firmly links the alcohol epidemic to the rise of the
drug scene and vice versa. ‘You can’t have one without the other; one of the reasons we have such increasing concentration of alcohol consumed, in my opinion, is because of the advent
of Ecstasy in the late 1980s. The acid house culture meant that the drinks industry were suddenly threatened by a collapse in their profits and they retaliated, as it were, by employing the
designers who had brought the music and clubs and fashion and so forth, to the deployment of vehicles of drink. They also increased the strength of drink from the 1970s to the 1990s. So you end up
with psychedelic drinks, coloured, blue, green, any kind of neon, and delivered in very trendy sexy vehicles that were very sweet and very tasty, particularly to young women.’

Dr Luke has a point, and for anyone who experienced the clubbing mecca of Sir Henry’s nightclub in Cork or any other thriving nightclub in the 1990s and 2000s, there weren’t many
pints of the black stuff being poured! In earlier chapters, I referred to the allure with which nightclubs in small towns, such as the Queens in Ennis, were viewed in local folklore. They were
sites of almost limitless possibility, where dreams were made, and many a nightmare began well before the chip van had pulled away. In the first few years of sobriety, I went to a few clubs, but
for me, sobriety and late-night clubbing just don’t gel. Some clubs, where the focus is more on music and ambience, can be tolerated, but generally the drinking den/cattle-mart variety holds
little appeal for the non-drinker. Many of the clubs I frequented in the 1990s and 2000s are gone now (Sir Henry’s was knocked down a few years back), although the Queens in Ennis is still
going strong. In the bar of the Harcourt Street Hotel, in the heart of Dublin’s nightclub sector, I met with Barry O’Sullivan, the Chief Executive of the Irish Nightclub Association
(
INA
), who told me about the decline of the sector and how the industry is calling for extended opening hours and how changing drinking patterns have impacted on his
members. By the year 2000, the association estimates that there were 530 nightclubs in Ireland—in 2007 this figure had shrunk to 330. ‘The rise of nightclub culture grew from the late
1970s and 1980s. The biggest change that happened for nightclubs since that growth was in 2000, when government removed the requirement for nightclubs to serve meal[s]. That gave birth to what we
all know now as late bars,’ explains Barry O’Sullivan.

The nightclub sector has noticed fundamental shifts in drinking patterns over the last decade. Whilst typically, clubs are now aimed at the 18–35 age group, many have installed so called
‘
VIP
’ rooms to cater for those of an older age. Late bars have prospered among this age group, with brighter lighting, lower music and a more relaxed
environment, and less emphasis on dancing and more on continuing drinking. It is estimated that up to 3,000 late bar licences now exist nationally.

‘In the 1990s, if you wanted do go anywhere past pub hours, you had to go to a nightclub and there were queues in every nightclub as a consequence. To be honest, businesses didn’t
have to put a whole lot of imagination into their product; they really just had to open the doors. If you look at the average club now, they are promoting their business hard, from websites where
in some cases each actual night of the club will have its own Bebo page.’

Having run a club in Temple Bar for eight years, O’Sullivan said the notion that everyone rushes to the counter for the last hour of drinking time, loading up on high volumes of shots, is
simply not the case. He also says that the nightclub sector is often blamed unfairly for fuelling the binge drinking culture and points to other factors, such as the tendency for clubbers and
pubgoers to begin the night at home with a few drinks.

‘In terms of drinking habits, it’s one of the misconceptions out there I have to deal with, especially from politicians when they talk about binge-drinking. As a sector, we know that
sixty per cent of young clubbers will have one to three drinks at home before they leave. They will visit three or four bars on a night out, and have one or two drinks in each venue. We know also
that the average consumer in a nightclub will have 2.7 drinks over the course of a night. So the nightclub is at the end of the course of the night’s drinking, and thirty per cent of it is
done before they ever leave the house. That’s what is happening in Ireland today.’

To back up his claims of how society scapegoats the nightclub sector, O’Sullivan makes reference to the Heaven nightclub in Blanchardstown. In 2007, security staff turned away 29,000
customers, mostly on Saturday nights, for being intoxicated. Many clubs in Temple Bar will turn away 200–300 people during the course of a night, which highlights the sheer scale of alcohol
abuse being carried out, if nothing else. ‘Look, there is no value to us in letting customers into our venue who are intoxicated. All it takes is for someone who has had too much bump into
someone and injure them and [it] could cost us thirty thousand euro.’

The point the nightclub industry consistently hammers home is that the majority of drinkers are now fuelling up before leaving the house. This is borne out also by the experience of well known
bar and club owner Paul Montgomery in Cork. Montgomery is the owner of one of the busiest nightclubs in Cork, Reardons, as well as several other late bar venues. He also owns a block of student
accommodation, which he opened with a bar on the ground floor. Several months in, the bar was replaced with an off-licence. ‘He then sees this migration of young people from their apartments,
bypassing the five bars he owns and going into nightclubs for a dance,’ says Barry O’Sullivan, ‘I think the nightclub offering will hold up better than the pub offering as we go
deeper into recession. The pub offering can be reproduced in the home environment, where cheap drink can save money. You can get friends over and put on some good music and watch sports or whatever
on plasma-style televisions. So the pub, now, can come to the punter in their sitting room. The downside to drinking at home, of course, is that you’re looking at the same faces all the time,
and people still want to go out! And that’s where nightclubs will come in.’

The sector is lobbying hard for closing times to be extended from the current 2.30 a.m. limit to 4 a.m. in Dublin, the reason being that the volume of nightclubs in Dublin is greater than
anywhere else in the country. For instance, in Harcourt Street within 200 yards of each other are four prominent nightclubs—Copperface Jacks, D/Two, Krystle and Tripod. Between them they can
churn 8,000 punters onto the street at the same time.

The whole city of Cork has nightclub licences for 16,000 persons, showing the high density of clubbers catered for in Dublin. Also the sector is looking for government to introduce permits which
would recognise the difference between normal bars and nightclubs—currently no such legislation exists. ‘The Guards have come to realise that restricted trading hours don’t lead
to an improvement in public order,’ says O’Sullivan. ‘Our thinking is that putting everyone on the streets at the one time creates problems.’