investigation by the BBC has revealed the true danger of the evil Buckfast tonic wine. Between 2006 and 2009 Buckfast was mentioned in over 5,000 crime reports in the Strathclyde region. Good lord! How shocking.The shock is not the utter amount of chaos Buckfast is portrayed as causing, rather it's the BBC's terrible analysis of these statistics.Let's start at the beginning. The BBC news story says:
the drink was mentioned in 5,638 crime reports in Strathclyde from 2006-2009, equating to three a day on average.One in 10 of those offences were violent and the bottle was used as a weapon 114 times in that period.Well the three-reports-a-day and one-in-ten-being-violent this works out as a violent incident involving Buckfast once every three or four days. And considering the large amount of violence that occurs in Glasgow on a day-to-day basis anyway this is almost totally negligible. It is also only slightly more often than a murder in Glasgow, one of which occurs roughly every 5 days. The second factoid tells us that in the three years the statistics are taken from a Buckfast bottle was used as a weapon less than 40 times a year. And according to previous BBC report there were 40 murders using knives in 2007. Murders, not just stabbings or assaults. Clearly the issue of knife crime is much more of a pressing issue than Buckfast-bottle crime - although of course there will be some overlap between the two.
The BBC also talk about the old urban legend that the amount of caffeine in Buckfast is what causes drinkers to go crazy. This is despite there being no scientific evidence for this. If this were the case then vodka-Red Bull mixes would bring about the same reaction surely?
Laying the blame for violent crime at the door of Buckfast is stupid and short-sighted. Buckfast may be involved in over 5000 crime reports, but how many involve beer, or whiskey, or wine, or sloe gin. How does this correspond to their respective share of the drinks market? Come to think of it, how many crime reports involve alcohol, and how what percentage is this of all crime? Just loudly stating "over 5,000 crime reports" is meaningless as you haven't given it any context.
And why is Buckfast to blame? I know plenty of people who like to drink it at parties, and none of them have managed to get in a fight or crack people's skulls open with the bottle. Most of them just end up passing out. The problem surely isn't that Buckfast makes people violent, more that violent people drink Buckfast. Stop them doing that and you'd probably see a rise in violence associated with some other drink.
Honestly, this is such pointless alarmist crap. Scotland collectively has a drinking problem. This is what needs to be sorted out. Not dangerously pointing fingers at some trumped-up bad guy, or demanding legislation to stop people from exercising their rights of consumer choice.