Booze, Baby Boomers, and a changing drinking culture

It marked the culmination of a booze-fuelled period which had seen average alcohol consumption per head in Scotland rise by more than 25% between the late 1980s and the mid-2000s.

By 2005, adults in Scotland were consuming 22.5 units of alcohol per week.

READ MORE: 

• Scotland and Alcohol: Read all the articles from the Herald investigation here 
• How did we get here? A short history of Scotland's changing drinking culture 
• Rehab crisis as beds up by just 32 in three years despite alcohol deaths

The surge in consumption had been driven by the falling cost of alcohol in real terms.

By the mid-2000s, beer and wine sold in supermarkets and off-licences was roughly three times more affordable compared to wages than it had been in the late 1980s.

By the early Noughties, 40% of all the beer sold in the UK was purchased off-trade.

Sales of alcohol off-trade overtook pubs and bars in the early 2010s (Image: IAS)

While much of the cultural focus was on young binge drinkers and 'ladettes', it was middle-aged drinkers - those aged 45-64 - who had the highest rate of alcohol deaths.

For a time, it looked like Scotland - and the UK as a whole - had turned a corner.

Between 2008 and 2012, alcohol deaths finally began to fall, dipping to 968 in Scotland.

Yet the past decade has been characterised by a seemingly counterintuitive decline in alcohol consumption and - once again - rising deaths. 

In 2023, the number was 1,277 - the highest since 2008. 

At the same time, average alcohol intake per head in Scotland has fallen by 20% since the mid-2000s.

In reality, the statistics point to a splintering of drinking habits between the generations.

While a growing proportion of risk-conscious adults in their 20s and 30s are giving up alcohol, cutting down, or abstaining altogether, 'Baby Boomer' Scots - many of whom came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when supermarkets and imports of wine and European lagers were transforming Britain's drinking culture - have replaced middle-aged Scots as the group most likely to succumb to liver disease.

Alcohol mortality by age group shows the most pronounced rises in the 65-74 and over-75 age groups (Image: NRS)

Men aged 70-74 in Scotland today are three times more likely to die as a direct result of alcohol consumption than men of the same age were in 1994.

For women, the death rate from alcohol is 2.5 times higher.

Despite a tendency to think of "problem drinking" as alcohol dependency, most older Scots dying from cirrhosis will be non-dependent heavy drinkers who have been consuming alcohol for years at high risk levels (over 35 units a week for women, and more than 50 for men) out of habit.

Changing the statistics may require a change of mindset.