Peak Booze

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Yeah, I had to dig up my diary for the piece and I couldn't read most of like my three years at university because I think I wrote it at like 4am

and it was just like,

I feel sick, drunk.

Or, you know, just going the first time I got drunk and my mum picked me up in the car with my boyfriend in the back of the car.

And the next day she was like, I don't want to see you like that again.

And I cringed.

I cringed.

I put it in the piece and I think it came out because I was like, oh, I just don't think, I don't think I can, oh, I don't, no, I can't.

It was embarrassing.

It was horrible.

My diaries from college, well, okay, they're not particularly filled with drinking stories, but I think I'd probably die if anybody read them.

I have not yet used them for a reporting project, but Chrissy Giles did.

This week we'll be talking to Chrissy about her story, which is all about peak booze.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber, and you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast where we look at food through the lens of science and history.

This week is all about alcohol, how much we drink, why, and what it's doing to us.

Plus, we get a sneak peek at the synthetic alcohol of the future.

Chrissy Giles is a British journalist.

We went to the same university, actually, Leeds University in the north of England, and she was a couple of years beneath me.

She recently wrote a story for Mosaic, and she starts that story with a very graphic and honest description of her drinking career.

Like most Brits, she started at 14 or 15, just sneaking drinks with friends.

But things really got going at university.

You know, Fresh's week, the first week at uni, was all about getting drunk so you could kind of, well, I thought so I could survive it.

Other people just got drunk because they could, and there was no one telling us not to.

You know, if you were sick, you had to clean it up, but you know, people didn't clean it up.

You lived in a communal hall.

It just happened.

It was just what we kind of did.

And then maybe we went to class in between.

Maybe we didn't.

To my shame, I can confirm that this was completely normal behavior.

That's probably normal for a lot of Americans during their orientation week at college, too.

Right, but in the UK, most of us just never stopped.

And you know, when I was 20 or 25 and I got drunk and I lost my purse or I threw up, you're like, oh my goodness, that's embarrassing.

But woo, I'm young.

Now I'm like 35 and doing the same.

I'm like, oh, I'm not young.

This is really cringy.

But I'm still doing it, right?

And everyone's still doing it.

So what exactly is happening when Chrissy is out getting wasted with her friends?

I mean, alcohol is a very interesting drug because it has different effects depending on how much you take.

That's David Nutt.

He's a neuropsychopharmacologist.

Give me a round of applause for saying that correctly.

And he's a former advisor to the British government on drug policy.

The thing it does is it starts to tickle up a system called the GABA system and the GABA system is a system which regulates anxiety.

If you turn on GABA, then you get less anxious.

So that relaxation, you begin to feel that disinhibition comes from enhancing this natural calming system in the brain called GABA.

But then when you push it up a bit more, other systems kick in.

You begin to kick in the dopamine system, which can make you a bit activated and a bit aroused and a bit chatty and a bit to maybe a bit argumentative and a bit driven.

And it gets even better.

And then if you push it up some more, you probably get a bit of serotonin release, which adds to the sense of well being and potentially the sense of harmony with others and

making other things seem more attractive, other people seem more attractive, and you feel very positive towards them.

But then you go too far.

For a woman of my size, after five glasses of wine.

Then you've started to impair glutamate transmission.

You're beginning to become less aware of what you're doing.

Your memory becomes impaired.

And your judgment becomes even more impaired.

And then if you push it up again, you start to get into blockade of glutamate receptors.

And when you block glutamate receptors, several important things happen.

The first is, and the most dangerous, is if you block them enough of them, you stop breathing.

And that's when people can die of alcohol poisonings.

That's the science of what's going on in Chrissy's brain as she drinks.

I'll except the last part, of course.

And five glasses might sound like a lot.

Well, it is a lot.

It is.

But it's a fairly average night out for 30-something in the UK.

Chrissy took a look at her own drinking, and she started to wonder, sure, this is normal for her friends and her age group, but is it normal for British people in general?

You know, we would drink on a a Friday night because it was Friday, like every weekend, every weekend night we would drink.

And then I was just kind of like, is this a hangover of behavior from university?

And then looking into it more, the current generation of people who are kind of 15 up or going to university, they just don't drink like we did.

So I think I kind of looked into it and then looking at the numbers, it was really this kind of peak in 2004 of consumption if you average it over every single person in the UK.

I was like, wow, that's that's interesting.

What the numbers seem to show is that Chrissy is part of generation peak Booze.

Which is terrifying because if she is, I am too.

So she started digging into the data.

It's surprisingly difficult to measure.

There's the question of what people report they drink, and that is not accurate.

No matter how kind of well you ask, people only admit to 50% of drinking.

So we say that we drunk this much, but actually, you know, the numbers are lying.

So researchers look instead at how much alcohol is sold.

Then they average that out for every adult of drinking age.

So this is obviously an average.

Some people drink a lot more, some are teetotal, some drink it all in one go, some drink steadily all day, starting with breakfast.

But there do seem to be patterns over time.

So it's kind of interesting.

You can obviously tell a different story the more you zoom in.

So if you look at the last 30 years, you know, you're like, oh, wow, we're really cutting down.

If you look from the 1950s, you're like, oh my god, we started drinking so much, but now we're drinking a bit less.

If you look from like 100 years, 1899 was a peak.

We drank more in 1899 than we did in 2004.

But no matter how you slice it, over the past century, drinking has gone up to a peak in 2004.

That's when Brits drank the most alcohol across the board since 1899.

That was peak booze.

For those of you who, like me, are not British drinkers, here's what peak booze looked like.

Researchers call what Chrissy was doing, they call it determined drinking.

So people talk about these kind of drinking careers and

you have like a repertoire of drinking and stuff like that.

But this determined drunkenness was really interesting and it was one of those things you read and you kind of go a bit cold and you're like, oh God, yeah, that's completely it.

This idea of like preloading.

I'm going to be your translator here.

Preloading is drinking a bottle of wine with your best mate as you put your makeup on.

Or that you wouldn't just go out to have a few drinks, and maybe a byproduct of that was getting a bit merry.

You know, this would be like, I am going to get hammered.

We're going to do it now.

We're going to get drunk before we go out.

We're probably going to drink in the taxi.

We'll maybe have a like, what would they call it, a tactical chunder, which is disgusting.

But, you know, people that would throw up, I don't know, like the Romans or something, so you could then continue drinking.

That was not part of my or Chrissy's drinking repertoire, just so you know.

Preloading, yes, tactical chunders, no.

I'm so glad to hear it.

As you can tell, this kind of determined drinking is messy and disgusting.

And again, hard though it may be to believe if you're not a Brit, it's also pretty normal.

Chrissy bared her drinking soul to shocked international readers so she could ask a broader question.

What led to her generation of Brits drinking so much more than earlier generations and what can we all learn from it?

Looking from, I guess, the kind of 1900s onwards, there were things kind of like, you know, two massive world wars and recessions and things like that that really kept not any kind of drinking low, but the kind of drinking populations just weren't there.

So they were away fighting.

The women didn't really drink and they certainly didn't drink in pubs.

While she was doing her research, Chrissy came across an amazing book called The Pub and the People.

It was written in the 1930s by a group of academics and it basically describes what went on in the pubs of Bolton in the north of England.

The researchers recorded all these amazing details, what people said and drank and did.

One of my favorite quotes is from a a doc worker when they asked him why he drank beer.

His reply was: There's only one reason I drink beer.

It is because I cannot eat it.

They did, in fact, eat other food there.

They'd eat hot pies and smoke and talk and throw darts and sing and play piano.

The men, that is.

The pub was like a living room, but only for guys.

And the beer they were drinking was a very mild ale.

In fact, it was called mild.

Super low alcohol, typically warm and flat.

In the 1960s, though, that all began to change.

So I think women had obviously been slightly freed from just being a housewife or a mother, so you would maybe work and that means you had your own money and you might even socialize with other women and oh my goodness, you might go to a bar or a club or a pub.

And I think the industry saw that women were coming out and maybe they didn't want to drink a big pint of lager that would make you kind of bloated and it's maybe a man's drink.

So they would kind of aim cocktails at us or glasses of wine.

And I think the kind of expansion of wine in the UK and especially especially drinking wine at home, and women drinking wine, it kind of all entwined to become a different way that we drank.

And it's, I talked to one researcher who called it this really efficient drug delivery system because it's kind of moorish, it's got this sophisticated thing, it can taste really nice, it can work well with food, and you get to have it in a nice glass.

And it became like, and it still is, I think, you know, a kind of classy way to get smashed to get smashed.

So now women are drinking too, and wine is becoming more popular.

And remember that flat, warm, low-alcohol, mild beer?

That got replaced by a sexy European import too, lager, which is not only fizzier, but also more alcoholic.

It was kind of in the 60s, 50s, and 60s, where people were traveling more on airplanes, on package holidays, and they'd go to Europe and drink a lager, and they'd be like, oh, this is exotic.

And then you'd go home and maybe you'd see it in a pub and you'd try it there.

And I think it was kind of a generation in the 60s where they, for some reason, didn't do the same as their parents.

And the design of pubs changed too.

No more cozy armchairs by the fire like in the pub and the people.

Instead the pubs were specifically engineered to encourage maximum boozing.

One of the main techniques was something called vertical drinking.

This vertical drinking idea was that you go somewhere and it would almost be like everything was designed to make you just consume.

So you would stand up not sit down and there's data saying that people drink more standing up than sitting down.

So the music's loud so you don't really talk and when you don't talk you drink more.

They probably wouldn't serve food but they might be salty bits and pieces so the salt makes you drink more.

You know, everything about it was kind of like drink, drink, drink.

And then the 1990s hit.

I remember the beginning of this time.

When I was in college in the US, there were sweet shots of hard alcohol and equally sweet, fizzy alcoholic drinks, clearly meant to mimic soda.

I didn't realize they had an actual industry name.

They're called Alco Pops.

The thing I didn't realize is that, according to Chrissy, Alco Pops were the booze industry's response to raves.

In the early 1990s, taking ecstasy and dancing with glow sticks and downing energy drinks was much cooler than going to the pub for a pint.

The alcohol industry started to get nervous.

And so they invented a sugary, colorful, energy-boosting drink of their own with booze in it.

Things like hooch, where it tasted sweet and it tasted, it didn't taste like horrible spirits, but it was still really strong.

So I think cocktails are a kind of similar way of doing it.

It was almost repackaging alcohol for people that didn't think they wanted to use alcohol.

So I think kind of alcohol pops and these energy drinks and all that kind of stuff came up and shots as well with this way of like, oh, you know, you're young and cool, but we're young and cool too.

Look at this new stuff.

Your dad wouldn't even know what this is.

You know, and you drink these kind of aftershock, these horrendous like apple sours.

I still, you know, it was like bright green.

It was like mouthwash.

It probably is mouthwash.

It's probably not mouthwash.

That's probably libeless.

It's akin to mouthwash.

You know, I remember these like licorice flavoured things.

People still drink it.

And it would just be gross.

And then I think in Leeds they opened this vodka revolution bar, which I think is still, they're still around.

And it was just like millions of types of vodka.

But, you know, it's still just neat vodka, right?

It's still really hard to drink, but it seems so fun.

It's like being in a sweet shop.

So grim.

I never saw the attraction of these, thank goodness.

But they were really, really popular when I was at uni.

Take all of this together: changes in the social status of women, changes in the design of the pubs, and innovation in the drink delivery format itself.

The alcohol industry convinced Brits to drink more than ever before.

Until 2004.

That's when this upward curve that Chrissy had seen started to change direction and head downhill again.

But why?

We know why Brits started drinking more.

Why did they start drinking less?

Turns out it's hard to answer.

There seem to be a bunch of factors.

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It's everything from kind of going to university now is really expensive, so maybe you have less money and maybe you're thinking, I've got to get a job.

The job market's really hard.

We're in a recession.

I need to like maximise my kind of life chances here and I'm not going to get smashed every night.

So maybe they're thinking more about that.

Somebody was talking about this idea of Instagram and Snapchat and how it's all about physical appearance and healthy.

So now there's that kind of what is that strong is a new skinny.

So I think there's this idea that maybe this culture is much more about appearance than we were and actually it's you know they they're not drinking because of physical stuff.

Also people are online a lot more.

Maybe you're at home and you're kind of having social life that way, so you're not going to the pub and you're not drinking.

People are taking street drugs, and maybe you're taking illegal drugs instead of booze, because actually, it's cheaper to get intoxicated on drugs than it is on booze, and you don't have to pee all the time.

Chrissy also says that the drop might not be the same for men and women.

So men have always drunk more than women, but actually, the kind of women's consumption is rising, whereas maybe men's is falling, or maybe women's isn't falling the same.

David Nutt had another theory to throw into the mix.

I mean, the other thing, of course, you've got to remember is that a lot of

drinking is a luxury.

It's to some extent determined, therefore, by disposable income.

And, you know, when there's a recession, it goes down.

The reason we've drinking has gone out in this country is only because we've gone through a recession in the last five years.

So, women's drinking hasn't necessarily slowed, and the dip may be temporary.

But what isn't in doubt is that my and Chrissy's generation, the generation that came of drinking age in the 1990s, we drank a lot.

And for the most part, we continue to do so.

The drinking pattern does seem seem to be different in the U.S., at least from my perspective.

I don't know many 30-somethings who continue with the type of drinking patterns that you and Chrissy described.

Drinking patterns are a little different in the U.S.

Historically, they were sky high.

In 1830, the average American over 15 years old consumed nearly seven gallons of pure alcohol a year.

That's a huge amount.

In the UK, in 2004, right at the very peak of peak booze, British people drank a little more than three gallons ahead.

Half the amount of an American in the 1830s.

That's a crazy number, but what about this past century?

Did we follow the same trends here in the US?

Yes and no.

Like in the UK, drinking went right down at the start of the 20th century.

You can thank Prohibition and the Great Depression for a lot of that.

Then, like in the UK, from the 1950s onwards, there's a steady climb.

But the US version of peak booze came in the early 80s.

At US peak booze, people were drinking just under 2.8 gallons ahead.

So that's still less than Brits in 2004.

Okay, so we were drinking a lot in the early 80s here.

And then what happened?

Well after that peak in the early 1980s per capita consumption went down pretty steadily in the US until 1998.

And then it started climbing again.

I wonder why.

Interesting thing about looking at the U.S.

numbers versus the UK is that the US is so huge, it's really hard to pick out those kinds of correlations at a national level.

Researchers tend to focus on regional patterns instead.

It's interesting to think about.

I was in college in the early 1990s and people were absolutely drinking, and sometimes they were drinking a lot.

But the stories about drinking on campus today seem far more extreme than what I remember.

It sounds like that matches the data.

People are drinking more than we were in the early 90s.

Yeah, that's right.

There's a little blip in 2008 with the financial crisis, but it's on an upward trend again.

Nowadays, Americans drink 2.34 gallons ahead.

Want to know where all those boozers live?

No idea.

New England.

That's the region with the highest consumption.

Really?

Maybe it's these long, cold winters.

We'll get back to Booz and even meet its synthetic replacement in a minute.

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So in the UK at least, it seems like we've hit peak booze.

Maybe.

Either way, teasing out the factors that lead to increased consumption or reduction is fascinating.

And it's actually really important because the one thing that is clear is that drinking a lot is really not very good for you, even if you're not an alcoholic.

People that have problems with alcohol, you know, where you go and get help, that's a different category.

And I deliberately didn't go there in this piece.

But I think for a lot of us, you know, we were drinking more than was probably healthy, but

we managed to continue.

But now I think it was kind of looking back, you're saying, well, if we really were this peak, have we done damage?

So I was talking to some kind of liver consultants and epidemiologists, and again, it's really, really difficult to say.

Everyone knows the immediate harm alcohol can cause.

You get dehydrated.

You might feel horribly nauseous and in pain the next day.

You might vomit.

According to the CDC, hangovers alone cost the U.S.

$249 billion in lost work and productivity and resulting health problems.

That number was from 2010.

They just calculated it recently.

But there's long-term damage, too.

There's cirrhosis.

Obviously, your liver does all the processing of alcohol, and it takes a beating.

Chrissy talked to some doctors about what they've seen happen to the nation's livers.

And it's basically your, you know, I guess pickling it.

But they've seen people die in their 20s and 30s, and women die in their 20s and 30s.

You know, they're kind of like, that is, you must have started at 11 or 12 and you must have drunk, you know, a lot and a lot of the time.

So I think there's this kind of, there's some genetic predisposition some people might have, but these guys were saying they hadn't seen this.

You wouldn't see that maybe 20 years ago.

David's reasons why booze is bad news didn't stop at the liver.

He has a laundry list of all the bad things alcohol can do to you.

It's very hard to find an organ system in the body that isn't damaged by alcohol.

I mean, alcohol is the only preventable cause of breast cancer.

It is responsible for about 4% of all breast cancer sensors.

It's the only one we think you can do anything about.

Alcohol kills more people through blood pressure than it does through liver disease.

And it kills a lot of people through liver disease.

In the brain, what it does is it also can damage the brain.

We see marked brain shrinkage.

in people who drink excessively.

Alcohol is more damaging to the brain than any other drug we know of.

It affects particularly if you drink excessively without taking a proper range of vitamins, particularly if you lose vitamin B1, thiamine, which many

people, alcoholics, are deficient in because they basically they drink alcohol and then eat just chips and fast foods.

You can end up having a damage to the the memory circuit in the brain, which is a

especially vulnerable to thiamine deficiency.

And then you get people who've got what's called corsicosamnesia, where they just lose any the ability to lay down new memories there was more but we've spared you one more downer though both chrissy and david mentioned a bodily harm from booze that you might not have thought of i spoke to a couple of people and they were like i noticed i was drinking too much because my you know my waist my trousers weren't fitting these were two men the calorific value of alcohol is enormous alcohol is one of the major causes of obesity in western world this is so true i cut back on drinking a couple of years ago and i lost half a stone without even trying

seven pounds.

That's a lot.

So that's what alcohol does to your body.

But there are also problems with alcohol on a societal scale.

Drunk driving is the obvious one.

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, alcohol is responsible for 50% of road traffic accidents and deaths.

In Britain, we estimate at least three-quarters of all domestic violence or child sexual abuse, half of all acquisitive crime.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know,

the economic costs and the social costs of alcohol are way greater than those of any other drug, probably all other drugs put together.

A typical Saturday night in the emergency rooms of London is dominated by booze casualties.

Many of them are the result of fighting.

As David told us, booze makes you argumentative, and there's plenty of weaponry around in a bar.

So it's basically, you know, if you get in a fight, you grab something.

I mean, not you, or not me, but people get in a fight, they grab something, and that's either a bottle or a glass, and they just kind of injure people with it.

And it's horrendous stories in the news, and they're not rare where people have just got glassed and had horrendous facial

injuries.

Some bars started pouring drinks into plastic cups to remove some of that weaponry.

And then there was a British design initiative to create a safer pint glass.

They call it the ultimate pint glass.

It breaks into tiny, tiny little bits, so it's useless as a weapon.

It went on sale in 2012, and it's a clever idea, but it's horrifying that it even needs to exist.

David kept telling us how bad drinking is.

There is no.

The answer is there is no safe limit.

Okay, I'd like to push back a little bit here.

I mean, we did just have a long episode about Mescal, which I love.

I love whiskey and gin.

I love cocktails.

I love beer and wine.

And there's plenty of research into the plant chemicals in beer and wine that are, in fact, good for you.

Right.

So this is the it's healthy to drink in moderation argument.

David was not having any of it.

Well, the thing about alcohol is

the problem with alcohol is it encourages you to drink more.

That's the nature of its pharmacology.

So that's the first thing.

The second thing is 10% of people who drink will become addicted.

That's obviously a huge problem.

But if we exclude those 10%, I believe that for many of us, it is in fact possible to have just one drink.

You know, we want to believe, the drinkers of us want to believe, you know, I drink, you know, I mean, I drink in full knowledge of the harms it may be doing me because there are benefits.

I mean, there are no question there are benefits in terms of socialization, in terms of mood, in terms of enjoying life.

And so David's question was, what if you could have all of those lovely benefits and none of the undoubted harms?

What if there was a better drug than alcohol?

Ah, right.

So, what we're trying to do is we're trying to look at the good things that alcohol does, work out how it does it in the brain through these receptors I've talked about, GABA, 5HT, etc.,

and then see if we can target those receptors in the parts of the brain where alcohol does its good things

and therefore give you the pleasure of alcohol without the inevitable consequences of drinking alcohol.

So, it's a kind of using science to take away the harms and replace it,

but keep the good aspects.

And that's kind of credible, really, because we know, you know, certainly we know that if we get a drink that contains something that mimics alcohol and people enjoy drinking but doesn't lead to damage, then a lot of people's lives will be saved.

We asked David how this replacement drug would actually work.

I'm modeling it.

Absolutely, really good question.

I'm modeling it on a cocktail.

My view is that we've got to, the way we progress this field is to put drinking back where it used to be, which is part of the social engagement.

So I'm looking to start selling this in cocktail bars, the high-end market where people want to go.

So

one or two would begin to get you pretty mellow.

Three would be about where you'd peak out.

So basically you'd add David's drug to delicious non-alcoholic mixers and you'd have yourself a really good time.

There are other benefits too.

We can make it such that if you do become so intoxicated that that you are out of control, we can give you an antidote.

And in fact we could take this even further.

We can actually go to a point where we could give people the antidote so they could just sober up after a party.

They go to a party, have a fun, and then take the antidote and drive home safely.

So we could kind of almost at a stroke reduce all the toxicity on the roads if people were sensible.

Sounds awesome.

Sounds like science fiction.

It's hard to imagine it could actually work.

Right.

So this has to be a long way off yet.

When do you think we might be able to try something like this?

Well, I mean, now, if you want, if if you were in my office, I could give you some, but

the stuff's made.

But it's about going from the concept to the enactment in a financially viable way in sort of the open market.

And I need, you know, we basically need someone with the courage to take it on.

That's actually the craziest part for me.

David's using an existing drug that has already been approved for human use, so this whole synthetic alcohol plan, it's not as unrealistic as it sounds, at least in some ways.

His drug does act on the brain in ways that are close to alcohol, but it's not exactly the same thing.

Alcohol, as David already described, it's a super complicated drug.

So would any substitute really match its effects?

I think in theory we could get very close.

I think in practice, you know, we have to go with what we've got.

I mean, I think to produce a perfect mimic of alcohol would be very, very challenging and very, very expensive.

But I think we can make progress.

And I would say there are two ways forward here.

One is, of course, that we've got to start somewhere.

And if we can begin to get people accepting safety is much more a much greater safety is worth having in rather than absolute mimicry, that's a good start.

And that would then raise money to be able to do more sophisticated development, to find something that's even more

even more like alcohol.

But then, of course, the other thing w that might happen is that people just say, well, that's good enough.

I mean, if if we had a whole generation

brought up on a safe alcohol, syntholol, rather than on alcohol, then they wouldn't be complaining, would they?

They would just be saying, yeah, this is good enough.

And, you know, good enough is good enough.

It wasn't until

about the 1600s, people were quite happy to drink wine and beer.

As anyone, we got the new technology of spirits, if people started getting interested in stronger alcohol.

So, you know, society basically uses what it can, and if it's safer and cheaper and nicer to use syntholol rather than alcohol, I think society would eventually switch.

If David's right, if people really would make the switch from beer and wine and whiskey and masculine, If we all did make the switch to David's syntholol, which maybe, by the way, needs a different name, that that shift, that shift would be revolutionary.

No, totally transformational.

I mean, we would reduce, if everyone in the world switched, we would reduce the personal toxicity of alcohol to virtually nothing.

So that would give the average alcoholic another 15 years of life.

We would reduce quite a lot of the road traffic accidents.

What we're hoping, and this is obviously more speculative, is that if we can, by targeting, as I said, the things that alcohol does, the good things that alcohol does, we might be able to avoid more of the unpleasant things like the aggression and the dependence.

And it might be that we can actually

eliminate significant amount of the social harms as well.

So

I think this could be a revolution.

I mean, I think this could be truly transformational if we can get people to buy into it and

switch.

I can see this taking off maybe in a limited amount, but I just have a hard time believing that it'll totally replace alcohol.

First of all, it doesn't replace the taste of a complex Pinot Noir or the bite of an IPA.

It works like a cocktail.

And every single community all over the world, as far as I know, has some sort of fermented liquid that they create and enjoy.

We love it.

Our relationship with alcohol goes back to before the dawn of agriculture.

Yeah, I mean, I'm intrigued.

I would love to try David Syntholol.

But the thing is, human culture is so intertwined with booze at this point that it's just really hard to imagine replacing it wholesale.

Still, after hearing David lay out the physical and social harms of alcohol so clearly and so convincingly, it seems really important to reduce the amount we drink.

My question is whether replacing alcohol is the way to do it.

There are other things that work, like policy.

The reason we have a huge increase in consumption in the last 30 years is because we have liberalized access, we've reduced taxation, we've turned a blind eye to preventative measures like reducing the drink driving limit.

And one thing we haven't done, which is what your country did, which was one of the most brilliant social health measures in the history of the world, which was to increase the drinking age from 18 to 21.

That happened in the 1990s across America.

Eventually all the states aligned to a 21-year-old drinking age.

And the estimates are that that saved

getting on now to over 300,000 lives on the roads of young people who would

get drunk and drive and kill themselves and their friends.

This is really interesting for me, actually, because honestly, I had always sort of thought that America was stupid for its super uptight alcohol laws.

All the blue laws and the no-open bottles outside and the drinking at 21.

It all just seemed ridiculous and Puritan and annoying.

For me it was especially the 21 part.

I used to drink wine on Friday night each week with my family for Shabbat dinner and it wasn't a big deal.

As a teen I lived in Switzerland with a family and we had wine all the time with our meals.

It made sense.

But David has a convincing argument.

Right, and you know, I believe in regulation.

Like I believe in gun control.

America has much, much easier access to guns than the UK and it has a lot more gun violence.

Please don't write in if you're a Second Amendment person.

I don't care.

I'm with you on gun control.

So, but I should believe the same same thing about booze, right?

I mean, logically, the UK should copy the US on this one.

You guys have it right.

Make alcohol less available and people drink less.

But these things are really cultural, too.

Should French teens not be drinking wine with their parents at dinner?

It's super complicated.

But Chrissy has another way that she personally has been able to cut down.

I've been tracking my alcohol for about a year, and it has helped me cut down because I'm consciously thinking about, am I drinking or not?

And I spoke to a few people about this, and the same as kind of Fitbits and stuff.

Self-tracking is a really effective way of just being more kind of mindful, I guess, of what you're drinking or how much you're exercising or what you're eating or any of that stuff.

Yeah, I've consciously cut down too.

It wasn't particularly difficult.

The downside is that I can't keep up with my British friends when I go home now.

Hey, I'm a total lightweight.

You can join me in that one.

But I feel better for it.

Plus, I can have more food.

Cheese, chocolate, these can be my empty calories instead, and they're not even empty.

I'm in favor of that one.

More cheese, and the occasional glass of wine or gin and tonic, of course.

Oh, of course.

Thanks this episode to Chrissy Giles, who is a science journalist and commissioning editor at Mosaic.

Her article about peek boos in the UK was published by Mosaic.

We have a link on our website.

And thanks also to David Nutt, chair of the UK's Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, and author of Drugs Without the Hot Air.

Link to that as well on our website.

Where you can also find past episodes, comment on this one, and of course, support us with a donation.

You can also show your appreciation by rating us on iTunes, which helps other listeners find us.

So, this tree, so far, we found three different kinds of mushrooms on this one-downed tree alone.

That's right, we'll be back in two weeks with an episode all about the science and history of mushrooms.

Thanks for listening.

Till next time.

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