The British press has got a new bogeyman: poor old George Best. He was found drowning his sorrows in his local pub and - not surprisingly - brawled with what turned out to be a News of the World photographer. Now it's open season on him. Doctors are queuing up to tell us how there were many far more deserving recipients of a liver transplant. Presumably his rapid death would have been their preferred option.
What is so unfair in Best's press treatment is that he is merely one of the many unfortunates who has fallen off the tightrope which anyone who drinks too much alcohol walks. And that in the UK is a large number of people, especially young people.
This week, a survey commissioned by the Department of Health and the food standards agency revealed that binge drinking is far more common than previously believed. At least once a week over half of all women between 19-24 drink more than the recommended three daily units (three small glasses of wine). One third drink more than double the recommended maximum on "binge days". Young men are even worse. One in seven drinks at least 51 units a week, the equivalent of 51 bottles of lager or 51 small shots of spirits.
Anyone who has been to any summer event this season - sport, concerts or just open-air gatherings - will already know that the level of drinking in the UK is staggering. I went to the Derby last month, not having been for many years, and was amazed at how much the event had become an outdoor piss-up.
Granted, racing was never exactly a temperance society rally, but this was different. Many people, especially young women, were drinking champagne from the moment they got on the train. By the end of the afternoon only a minority were watching the races. Many were lying on the floor, some looked unconscious and the vast majority were seriously the worse for wear. It's no surprise to learn that consumption of champagne in the UK is now second only to France, having gone up a staggering 25%.
Much of this is binge drinking, the sort of drinking to excess adolescents go in for when they don't know any better, such as downing a whole bottle of vodka they have pinched from somewhere. It's something you imagine would only be tried a couple of times. But now, binge drinking is for older groups, too, and, even more remarkably, has become a heroic activity in itself, not a ghastly mistake. Getting completely smashed out of your head - including vomiting and passing out - has become young Britons' number one pastime, like adolescents with the incomes of 40-year-olds.
I don't want to sound puritanical about this. Alcohol also happens to be my drug of choice and it's not unknown for me to miscalculate what might be a sensible amount. But even so, I find very odd the idea of going out specifically to get smashed, as I do the idea that vomiting and passing out is the sign of a really successful night out.
It smacks of desperation. This is a culture with too much disposable income and not enough challenges or forms of pleasurable connection between young people without alcohol. Conversation, social connection, sex and sport now all require alcoholic props.
It's odd, too, how we deny alcohol's health risks, as if it's the one "safe" activity in an over risk-conscious society. Yet unlike many other things we do to abuse our bodies, alcohol's downside is all too easy to experience. It makes us feel terrible and takes time to recover from. We feel instantly better if we cut back.
And if we choose to see it, evidence of alcohol poisoning is all around. Only last week an English woman died on a family holiday in the Caribbean after an evening's drinking that sounded no different from a student night out. The increasing number of babies born with foetal alcohol syndrome is also a terrible indication of alcohol's toxicity. But these are just the extreme end of the statistics: 33,000 people a year now die from drink-induced causes, including ill-health, road crashes, violence, alcohol poisoning and other accidents.
In the circumstances we should thank George Best and try and prolong his life by whatever means available. The longer he goes on, a walking medical complication, staggering along the long hard road of recovery from alcohol addiction, the better. Dead, he'd be just one of those forgotten statistics of alcohol-related deaths. Alive, he's a very poignant example of what heavy drinking can do.
