One drink is too much for me, Brendan Behan used to say, and a thousand not enough. That, in a more modest way, appears to be the drinking philosophy of quite a few of our own youth, judging by the report of the NHS information centre based on a survey of 8,000 11-15 year olds. The good news is that the overall numbers of schoolchildren who admit to drinking has fallen. The bad is that a hardcore of children and teenagers are drinking more than ever. The average weekly amount of alcohol being consumed by children is 11.4 units, or more than eleven vodkas, or five pints of lager.

This is not a subject on which I can be particularly censorious. I have no secrets from you dear reader and I admit that my small daughter, who is a year and a half, seizes my wine glass whenever I am drinking at dinner and roars until I let her have some - a mere sip. There.

Still, even I can see that the figures for adolescent drinking is something to worry about. But I worry that we are going to draw exactly the wrong conclusion from these findings. Sure enough, Professor Roger Williams, one of Britain's leading addiction experts, has identified the problem as cheap drink. He says that supermarkets are selling drink for “pocket money prices”. And indeed, the price of drink is nearly 70 per cent cheaper relative to income than it was in 1980.

But I don't think the correlation is that simple. If it were, the drinking behaviour of Europe would be very different than it actually is. At present, drink, specifically wine, in Mediterranean countries really is pocket-money cheap - in Naxos, the bit of Greece where I'm going shortly, you can get a bottle of wine for between three Euros and fifteen. Yet in precisely these countries there is relatively little binge drinking.

Actually, the country with the worst drinking record in Europe, is, believe it or not, Ireland, where the level of individual alcohol consumption rose by 2.7 per cent last year. Yet prices of alcohol in Ireland are higher than here. I know because I sent my mother off to do some empirical research in the local branch of Tesco (Ireland) and she found that all the problem drinks like alcopops were more expensive there than here - a bottle of own brand vodka was nearly twice the price in British branches. Still, ministers in Ireland insist that they're going to get tough on supermarkets and garages - on the points of sale. Just like Alistair Darling.

The truth is that there are graver reasons than price for why young people are drinking to nihilistic excess. It may be a product of social deprivation, it may be that drink is a stimulant for lives that lack much love or meaning. It may, in short, be a spiritual problem. That's harder to fix than the headline-grabbing option of raising the price of a pint.

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