© Thomas Albdorf at Webber Represents

Gemma died young. We’d been in the same year at school and, like me, she’d gone to university afterwards. One night in 2001, my sister told me that Gemma had been killed. The car she was in was hit by a van that crossed onto the wrong side of the motorway. The driver was reportedly more than four times over the legal alcohol limit. I remember thinking that it seemed impossible that someone our age was gone. She wasn’t alone, of course: more than 500 people were killed by drunk drivers on British roads that year. Young drivers were most likely to have drink-drive accidents, and while a large majority of those drivers were men, women made up nearly a third of the casualties.

Drinkers do all sorts of other damage. Alcohol makes many of us unpleasant: verbally abusive, angry, destructive. Minor disagreements can become violent – part of the reason why around half of violent offenders are thought by their victims to be under the influence of alcohol. There’s a horrifying scene in the 1996 film Trainspotting where one of the characters, Begbie, attacks a man in a pub by thrusting a full pint glass straight into his face. It’s called “glassing” and it’s a common enough problem that some pubs have started using pint glasses made from plastic or strengthened glass that are very hard to smash. (It says something about British drinking culture that images from Trainspotting were used in the tenth anniversary press campaign for Revolution Vodka bars.) “Alcohol intoxication is a powerful driver both of violence-related injury and violent offending,” say the authors of a 2014 study from Cardiff University.

It’s tempting to link the amount we drink with the frequency of alcohol-related harm, but it’s hard to do so definitively because many factors are involved. Drink-driving casualties have been falling since the 1970s, for example, probably due to better education for offenders and media campaigns. British roads might also be safer because more of our drinking now takes place at home. Still, the steady decline in drink-driving fatalities of the last 40 years was temporarily reversed between 1999 and 2004 – a period that closely matches the rapid rise in alcohol consumption that led to Peak Booze. We just don’t know if this is coincidence or causation.

Crime statistics suggest a similar link to alcohol consumption. The authors of the Cardiff study attribute a fall in the number of assault victims treated in emergency departments in England and Wales to a number of factors, including the recent decrease in overall alcohol consumption and pubs using plastic glasses.

The members of generation Peak Booze may well have harmed themselves, too. Our bodies don’t help us much on this front: there are no pain fibres in the liver, so we can’t feel the harm that we may be doing there. But the statistics roughly track consumption: annual alcohol-related liver deaths in England and Wales climbed steadily until around 2008, when the numbers levelled off. Several experts told me that changes – since reversed – in alcohol policy that made booze less affordable were having a positive effect on liver deaths. The incidence of alcohol-related deaths, which includes nervous system degeneration and poisoning as well as liver disease, also began falling a few years after Peak Booze. Again, we don’t know if these are linked or not.

Things seem to be different in the generation that followed mine. Not so long ago, I gave a careers talk at a university for a lecturer friend. There was wine on offer afterwards, but the undergraduate students left, declining the free drinks. We five panellists felt the only decent thing to do was to drink all of it, and then go out to drink more. I remember trying several different beers at the first pub. We moved on, and that’s when things start to go hazy. At some point we got food; I remember a chilli-eating contest that I lost, painfully. My final memory is of a prohibition-themed cocktail bar, and of being handed a jam jar with rum in it. The next morning I crawled into university with my friend, to watch her give her 9am taxonomy lecture. The students filed in and, while not exactly bright-eyed, seemed in better condition than me.

This generational difference isn’t just anecdotal. Young people are drinking less frequently, and more of them are teetotal. We don’t know why: it could be financial hardship, an increase in the proportion that don’t drink for religious reasons, or increased time spent online. Nor do we know whether the decline will continue. Still, this generation’s relative reluctance to drink is part of the reason UK alcohol consumption in 2013 was only 7.7 litres per person, the lowest since 1996 and nearly 2 litres lower than Peak Booze.

For many of us in the Peak Booze generation, it’s still normal to go to the bar after work on Friday. The weekend starting on Thursday is normal. Drinking because you’re happy, because you’re sad, because there’s a random beer in the fridge – all normal. Even in our thirties, with partners and babies and jobs and mortgages, we understand when someone loses their purse while drunk, pukes in a taxi, or sleeps in their clothes and crawls into work with a hangover. In fact, drinking isn’t just normal to our generation. In some ways, it defines us. It’s hard not to think that this isn’t partly because we grew up watching alcohol adverts on the TV, surrounded by plentiful, cheap booze in the supermarket. Today the drinks commercials are more tightly regulated, but the wine-sponsored TV cookery contest and beer-branded football shirt are here, reminding us that alcohol is a normal part of everyday life.

Beyond the health risks and potential harm from drink-fuelled crime, there's the more insidious aspect of Peak Booze: the mental baggage it has left us with. I wouldn’t say any of my close friends are alcoholic, but a fair few of us are more dependent than we’d like on that cold glass of white wine or cheeky gin and tonic at the end of the day. It’s important to me to know that drinking is a choice, not a need. I want to be in control of what I do. Yet if I choose not to drink for one night out, I find myself rambling an explanation, assuring people that, no, I’m not pregnant. The fact that staying sober for a month is seen as a feat of willpower, and the subject of charity campaigns such as Dry January, shows just how embedded alcohol is in our lives. It’s the grease that keeps many of our days moving. This would be fine if we chose to be part of the drinking culture. Sometimes it feels like it chose us.