ABSTRACT
Described as a ‘new culture of intoxication’ (Measham and Brain, 2005 binge drinking emerged, as identified by many tabloid newspapers, as a new moral disease in the early 1990s. Differing from previous incarnations of social concern around alcohol consumption, such as the ‘gin craze’ so memorably depicted by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, or the lager louts of the 1980s, binge drinking is a distinctly consumerist phenomenon. The term resists clear definition and is often used in a pejorative sense, a semantic tool with which to denigrate the leisure choices of the young and those who would traditionally have been described as ‘working class’. It describes excessive forms of alcohol consumption and drunkenness, usually focused on weekends.
