Our need to get drunk in company may be innate

It was once a favourite theory of optimistic drunkards that a suitably ‘moderate’ level of alcohol consumption provided covert health benefits. The mechanism was always a little obscure. But it was a fairly sure thing that reds — or was it all booze? — by virtue of some enzyme or vitamin or whatever, and judiciously drunk in something between homeopathic and industrial quantities, protected against heart attack — or was it ischaemic stroke… or memory loss? This, at any rate, was the glass-half-full defence of moderate drinking.

Then a paper published in the Lancet in 2018 pulled the rug out from underneath the moderate drinker (not something, needless to say, that he finds terribly helpful). The much publicised study concluded that there was actually ‘no safe level of alcohol consumption’; previous, more optimistic, studies were ‘inaccurate’; tax, regulation and ‘restrictions on the physical availability of alcohol’ should be employed to discourage drinking.