Binge headlining

'Scots drink 46 bottles of vodka' shrieks the BBC.

What does this mean to you? All of the Scots? 46 bottles over a period of years? Every day?Vodka to the exclusion of everything else?

Well, what they wanted to force down your throat is that the average Scot, 'over the age of 18', drinks this amount, on average, every year. A bit less than a bottle a week, although how they know it was drunk by people over 18 is beyond me. My experience of Scotland (I worked in Edinburgh for a bit) is that it is a heady mixture of alcoholics (from the age of 6 upwards) and proselytising teetotallers.

Anyway, in modern nanny state parlance this is 26.5 units, on average, assuming no one under 18 drinks a drop.

So let's look at it, taking as our norm an adult professional person. He or she comes home in the evening after work and unwinds with a large whisky (like Margaret Thatcher) or gin and tonic. Just one. A pub double (which isn't very much when you pour it yourself) would make 10 units a week (weekdays). On Saturday and Sunday our person doesn't have the whisky but has 2 pints of beer or equivalent with friends in a pub; 9.4 units. Two pints isn't much; you wouldn't be in the pub for long. In the evenings man and wife share a bottle of wine; 33.6 units each.

So our person, who drinks, but not to what anyone other than a crazed temperancer could describe as excessively, has had 45 units, 70% more than the average level thought of as appalling.

You see, what they do here is take an average and in Scotland, perhaps England too, it's an average between some people drinking too much, some nothing and some normally . The people clogging up Scotland's A & E units are drinking far more than our model citizen above, perhaps three times as much, which would be five times the 'shocking' amount drunk at the moment (and that hasn't taken account of the drunken teenagers).

Their solution, of course is to penalise the average. Until we 'averagers' stand up and put a stop to it, this insane treatment of ordinary law abiding folk is going to continue, using the twisted statistics which we never seem to complain about.