‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his dull middle-class muckers in order to ‘drown in honey’ (also champagne, Catholicism and plover’s eggs) with Sebastian and his rich Oxford set.
By the time I arrived at university at the turn of the century, debauchery had long been democratised. John Lennon had smoked a spliff in the gents at Buckingham Palace, while another working-class hero, Julie Burchill, reckons she hoovered up enough gak to ‘stun the entire Colombian armed forces’. Acquiring a massive habit was no longer the preserve of the Marquess of Marchmain’s son. Spend a few quid in one of the clubs I frequented in Edinburgh in the late 1990s and early 2000s and your jaw would soon be swinging wildly alongside those of a duke’s daughter and a welder from Fife. Everyone was at it.
‘The druggiest people I knew as teenagers were Etonians and London day school girls’
So it was sobering to see that drink and drugs – along with a first-rate education and owning your own flat – are back to being the preserve of posh kids. Analysis of NHS data has found that children (defined as aged 11–15) using illegal drugs, alcohol and vaping are more likely to come from wealthier families.
A report by the Social Mobility Commission found that 32 per cent of children from more affluent homes admitted to drinking alcohol the previous month, compared with 17 per cent in the less affluent group. Meanwhile, 23 per cent of children from wealthier backgrounds had consumed illegal drugs, compared with 17 per cent of those from poorer backgrounds.
‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ says one millennial friend, ‘the druggiest people I knew as teenagers were Etonians and London day school girls.’ Another friend recalls, with a snort, the chat of Old Etonian drug dealers in clubs in St Andrews: ‘So, Alice, what’s the best mark you’ve ever got in a dressage test?’
Frankly, the only part of these findings that shocked me was the bit about vaping, because vaping is so Nicky-Haslam-on-a-tea-towel naff. Some might be reassured to learn that smoking bucked the trend, being slightly higher amongst the less affluent group, at 5 per cent versus 4 per cent. This made me feel slightly warm and fuzzy, reminiscent of Bert Baxter and his Woodbines in Adrian Mole and the former health secretary John Reid declaring, in 2004, that smoking was one of the few pleasures left for the poor. However, at £17.05 for a packet of Benson & Hedges now in Asda, his words now look quaintly Dickensian. Today he’d be more likely to say, ‘Let them smoke vapes. Or roll-ups.’
I talk to a friend who teaches at a crammer. Most of his charges have been kicked out of private schools. ‘Drugs are rife,’ he confirms. ‘In my experience, rich kids are much more likely to get baked.’
This is borne out on screen, too. Watch series-of-the-moment, Industry, set in an investment bank, and the only pills the state-educated graduates are popping are Pro Plus, so they can work through the night to make up for their perceived disadvantages. Meanwhile, their more affluent colleagues are pulling a different sort of all-nighter, involving snorting naughty salt off the embonpoint of a comely clubber. It’s as if the Big Bang that swept away centuries of tradition never happened. What next – a return to bowler hats to really ram that social stratification home?
The report struggles to find exact reasons for the disparity, other than ‘anxiety and poor mental health’ (the data is from 2021 when we were still living under pandemic restrictions), though it does note that adults in higher socio-economic groups drink more – possibly because they can more easily afford it. .
A friend who’s doing a monthly drugs test of her 14-year-old daughter’s hair, since she was expelled from her £45,000-a-year boarding school, might agree. She was shocked to learn that a group of 15- and 16-year-olds from the local boys’ school turned up to a party with bags of MDMA and cocaine. A generous allowance, living away from home and possibly some burgeoning issues about being sent away (read Charles Spencer’s book, A Very Private School, on the effects of boarding from a young age) create the conditions for proliferate drinking and drugs.
Bizarrely, this analysis was carried out by the Social Mobility Commission (one might think they could do more useful work by, say, assessing the impact on social mobility of returning grammar schools to every town). The deputy chair of the commission tells us he’s ‘deeply concerned’ by the findings and that ‘young people from more affluent backgrounds are more likely to use these substances than disadvantaged children – and the gap is widening.’ He doesn’t tell us how he proposes to close this ‘gap’.
Perhaps the Social Mobility Commission could look at reinstating the ‘weed heaven’ Fridays of Camila Batmanghelidjh’s now-defunct charity Kids Company, when disadvantaged children would be given cash handouts – which were immediately spent on drugs. Until then, the revolution will be fought on a diet of Rizla papers and cheap hand-rolling tobacco.
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