What happens if we all stop drinking?
For all the talk about millennials shunning drinking, it’s the generation below – the oldest of which are 24 – that abstain like never before. We ask the experts: what would happen if we all just… stopped?
By Chris Stokel-Walker
May 9, 2019
When was the last time you had a drink? Depending on your age, it might be last night, last week – or never.
Alcohol consumption amongst Generation Z – the oldest of whom are just 24 years old – is flatlining. Today’s young adults drink at lower rates than adolescents have in generations. The after-work drink on a Thursday or Friday night could soon be a thing of the past; a wild night out at the weekend could involve many things, but it won’t include shots or pints. And that could have enormous effects – not just on bars reliant on stressed-out workers wanting to unwind at the end of the week, but on society as a whole.
“We’re going through a paradigm shift,” says Spiros Malandrakis, head of research for alcoholic drinks at analyst firm Euromonitor. We’ve had hundreds of years of cyclical shifts in what we drink – tending to avoid the drinks our fathers did – but abstaining altogether is momentous. Malandrakis pins the blame for less boozing on several causes: we’re more fascinated by keeping fit, we’re in more debt than ever and don’t have the cash spare to spend on drinks and, most importantly, we’ve all got smartphones. “Young people perceive themselves as something of a brand to be meticulously curated online and they wouldn’t like photos of drunken antics coming up almost a decade later that could ruin a career,” he says.
So what could happen in a future when we all shy away from booze?
“I think it could have a big effect,” explains Linda Bauld, deputy director of the UK Centre For Tobacco And Alcohol Studies and a professor at the University Of Edinburgh. “The thing about alcohol consumption is that the younger someone starts drinking, the more at risk they are of becoming a heavier drinker later in life.” If Gen Z aren’t turning to the bottle at all, there’s an ever-increasing chance they never will.
This isn’t some odd aberration in the history of humanity, though. “It’s been slowly building up in the background for the last few years,” says Malandrankis. Abstemious teens aren’t the anomaly: steaming baby boomers are. In the post-war years, UK alcohol consumption has steadily risen until the mid-noughties, fuelled by cheap drinks offers at pubs and bars, the availability of discount booze in supermarkets and the rise of glitzy advertising promising women would be hanging off your elbow if you downed a couple of shots of posh vodka. Then it dropped off. In 2005, two-thirds of British adults drank at least once a week. By 2017, just 57 per cent did. “The generation in their twenties and thirties in the Nineties were an incredibly heavy drinking cohort,” says Aveek Bhattacharya of the Institute Of Alcohol Studies (IAS). “This might be a regression to the mean.”
We’re seeing an increase in teetotalism: 19 per cent of those aged 16-24 said they never drank in 2005, compared to 23 percent in 2017. It’s puzzling social scientists. “The explanation doesn’t seem to be public health measures because we’ve not been terribly successful at that,” says Bauld. Unlike smoking, which has seen indoor bans, increased taxation and an advertising blackout stub out uptake, alcohol continues to be advertised and sold everywhere, while successive chancellors freeze beer duty for easy political gains.
Though it’s one of demography’s oddest quirks, it’s welcomed. “Alcohol is a major preventable risk factor for cancer,” explains Bauld. Each year 13,000 people die from seven cancers linked to alcohol and the UK’s preponderance of liver disease, which takes 20 or 30 years to develop, is higher than elsewhere in Europe: the long hangover of late nights boozing in the Eighties and Nineties. A third of drinkers under the age of 24 said they’re shunning alcohol to ward off long-term health problems, according to a study commissioned by alcohol industry lobby firm Portman Group. Booze is also a factor in dementia and preventable deaths from accidents and suicide and is the cause of one in 50 hospital admissions in 2017/18. “If these young people are drinking very little, they’re at less risk of that occurring as well,” says Bauld.
Teetotal drinkers are also a lifesaver for emergency services. Up to half of the incidents emergency services tackle at peak times can be tied to alcohol, says Bhattacharya. “It accounts for a huge amount of their workload.” Though there’s little hard data, the IAS’s conversations with police officers and ambulance crews indicate their Friday nights are quieter than they used to be as Generation Z replaces the heavy drinkers that went before them.
For now, alcohol-specific deaths are rising: at 5,843 in 2017, the most recent year for which data was available, up 16 per cent in a decade. But that’s because of people in their forties and fifties feeling the effects. Those over 45 account for 83 per cent of hospital admissions, according to official figures. Younger people aren’t going to A&E as often – possibly because they’re off the bottle.
All this has an economic impact, too. Our penchant for booze contributes £16 billion to the UK economy. There’s little evidence to say the night time economy has been affected by younger generations shunning alcohol. “People are drinking less alcohol in pubs yes, but pub revenue doesn’t seem to have declined,” says Bhattacharya. Likewise, while takeaway outlets may suffer from a lack of drinkers seeing a soggy kebab, restaurants and cafes can benefit from friends choosing to meet up over a meal, rather than a round. “Heavy drinking in the nighttime economy has knock-on effects in terms of crime and vandalism,” explains Battacharya. Taxi drivers and bus drivers may be less busy ferrying half-cut passengers home, but they also spend less time cleaning up vomit from the backs of their cabs.
Though that’s good news for many, drinks manufacturers are worried. “I have been shouting from the rooftops that this is an existential question,” says Malandrakis. We’ve seen a raft of what the industry calls “non-alcoholic adult beverages” – to distinguish them from soft drinks – arriving into pubs, from no- or low-alcohol beers to booze-free botanicals like Seedlip (which has seen investment from drinks giant Diageo). No- and low-alcohol beers comprise eight per cent of Budweiser’s global sales and is predicted to increase to 20 per cent by 2025.
“The ultimate destination I foresee is the creation of a holistic, responsible intoxication industry,” says Malandrakis. As attitudes change, expect to see cannabinoid-infused beers hit the market. Constellation, one of the world’s biggest beer brewers (and the company behind Corona) has spent billions buying up a stake in cannabis grower Canopy Growth. Their first product is in development, scheduled to arrive on Canadian shelves later this year. There’s still a market for getting messed up – just in a different way.