"TOP BOY", a drama shown on Channel Four earlier this month, depicted a London housing estate awash with guns, gangs and illicit substances. Almost every young person who was not selling drugs seemed to be buying them. As television, it was rather good. As sociology, it was questionable. Compared with other English youngsters, Londoners are oddly abstemious.
Surveys by the National Health Service show that Londoners aged between nand 15 are less likely to smoke than are youngsters in every other English region. They drink alcohol much more rarely Qust12% did so in the week before the survey, compared with between 19% and 26% in the other regions) and are no more likely to take illicit drugs. Another largescale survey for the Department of Education rolls drink and drug use among young people into a single measure. Again, London stands out for its sobriety.
London's teenagers may be lying. Other surveys show that people in their late teens and early 20s are slightly more likely to take drugs if they live in the capital (although, confusingly, Londoners become abstemious again in their 30s). Another explanation is that the capital contains a lot of immigrants from places where youthful drinking and smoking are rare-particularly the Indian subcontinent. Ealing, which is heavily Asian, has London's lowest rate of youthful substance abuse. But if stricter Asians were the explanation, northern cities like Bradford would also be abstemious. They are not always. London's odd social make-up may help to explain the pattern. In addition to an immigrant-heavy working class, the capital has a lot of affluent professionals, who may be unusually keen to steer their children away from mind-altering chemicals. Wealthy counties like Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire also have belowaverage rates of youthful drink and drug abuse, although not as low as London's.
There is a more startling possibility: London represents the future. Alex Stevens, a criminologist at the University of Kent, points out that the capital generally leads drug trends. Heroin emerged in London and a few other large cities in the 1980s, then spread. So did cocaine. Home Office surveys show that adults in the capital were twice as likely to take powder cocaine as were adults elsewhere in the late 1990s. Having declined in London and risen everywhere else, the drug is now as popular in the far north of England as it is in the capital.
Britons have been hooked on drink and drugs for so long that it is hard to imagine them dropping the habit. But if the country were to become less intoxicated, the earliest signs of change would probably appear in the city.
Source of Information : [The Economist] Volume 401 Number 8760 Nov 19th - Nov 25th 2011
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