Risk, Control and Hyper-Moderate Drinking Amongst Generation Z

In recent decades, excessive drinking and young people have been inseparable in public, political and academic debates on alcohol in the UK. The association of young people with problematic drinking has been apparent since at least the 1960s (Yeomans, 2014) and attracted increased attention in the early twenty-first century. During this time, an expansion of the night-time economies of many city and town centres (see Hollands & Chatterton, 2003; Hadfield, 2006) coincided with the emergence of ‘binge drinking’ as the preferred description of excessive youth drinking practices (Critcher, 2008; Berridge et al., 2009; Hayward & Hobbs, 2009). Binge drinking was widely condemned in the 2000s; Prime Minister Tony Blair called it a ‘new British disease’ (BBC News, 2004) and newspaper columns were filled with lurid descriptions of ‘booze Britain’, as well as salacious images of drunken young people—usually female—in various states of public intoxication (Critcher, 2008; Nicholls, 2010). Despite these representations of unbridled hedonism, academic studies have found a different reality. Although actively pursuing intoxication, young people were making situational adaptations in order to mitigate certain risks by, for example, ensuring they retained the capacity to safely negotiate the journey home, avoid violent confrontations or take action to minimise hangovers (Measham, 2004; Measham & Brain, 2005; Szmigin et al., 2008). Binge drinking thus came to be understood as at least partly calculated; not pure hedonistic abandon but a ‘controlled loss of control’ (Measham & Brain, 2005, p. 273). This chapter revisits the connections between risk, control and young people’s alcohol consumption in an era of declining drinking.