As Much Caffeine As Eight Cans of Coke

That's Buckfast in the photo, being reached for on the top shelf. Buckfast, in case you did not know, is an expensive single malt Scottish whisky is a nasty, vile, cheap booze favored by old homeless winos in Scotland, and also, perplexing to Scotland's political leaders (who get drunk on better stuff), by hordes of bored and dangerous teenagers.

Buckfast, as a New York Times article points out, contains 15% alcohol and "as much caffeine as eight cans of Coke." The piece points out what to my many friends in Scotland is blindingly obvious: Scotland has a drink problem. So does England, by the way. And in Ireland... already notorious worldwide for being unreliable, feckless swillers, Irish people managed to increase the amount of booze being bought by 40 percent in the decade 1990-2000.

{WARNING TERRIBLE TRANSITIONAL QUIPS COMING UP] After that statistic, I need a drink. In fact, I came across other stats out of Scotland which make for sobering reading show that perhaps the Times piece was watered down on the mild side: Scots spend £5 billion each year on booze...Alcohol accounts for one in four men and one in five women who die between the ages of 35 and 44...

And about the Buckfast, the New York Times noted its special place in all this dysfunction:

Buckfast does not seem to help. In a survey last year of 172 prisoners at a young offenders’ institution, 43 percent of the 117 people who drank alcohol before committing their crimes said they had drunk Buckfast. In a study of litter in a typical housing project, 35 percent of the items identified were Buckfast bottles. And the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them).

And hence, the photo above...

Interestingly, one of the changes made to try and stop crazy drunken criminal and anti-social behavior a few years ago was the extension of pub opening hours in England and Scotland to 24-hours a day: a bar can, if the owner wishes, stay open and serve drinks all day long and all night through. This was supposed to stop the rush to drink as much as possible before closing time at midnight, before drunk mobs would spill outside into mayhem. Apparently it has not worked so well...