Lying in bed, wide awake, in the early hours of new year's morning, I listened to the seven ages of drunkenness. First, the jovial, as wellwishers exchanged decent Edinburgh greetings with the decorum still required in this most civilised of cities. Then the merry, as small groups of carousers careered down the pavements, their high-decibel cries indeterminate but good-humoured. Shortly afterwards, the strident, as someone assayed the first tuneless chant of 2008, something between Auld Lang Syne and Leon Jackson, an experiment clearly in need of more rehearsal.

Then, the maudlin, a duet of weeping female recrimination, interrupted occasionally by a low male monotone that seemed to be having little effect. Things deteriorated around 3am with a shouting match, rich in expletives, and the sudden sound of running feet. Finally, the real thing, a fight, a scuffle. And then, the denouement, the sound of a police siren, more running feet, the fading sound of threat and rancour. The rest is silence.

So, nothing new here. I looked back at Robert Louis Stevenson's account of New Year's Day in Edinburgh 120 years ago, and found it instantly familiar: “From an early hour a stranger will be impressed by the number of drunken men; and by afternoon the drunkenness has spread to the women. With some classes of society, it is as much a matter of duty to drink hard on New Year's Day as to go to church on a Sunday. Some have been saving their wages for perhaps a month to do the season honour... The streets, which are thronged from end to end, become a place for delicate pilotage. Singly or arm-in-arm, some speechless, others noisy and quarrelsome, the votaries of the new year go meandering in and out and cannoning one against the other; and now and again, one falls, and lies as he has fallen.”

There is one difference, however. RLS's new year excesses are now a weekend ritual in Britain's towns and cities, the cannoning and the falling down supplemented by the fights and the broken bottles and the loutish assaults that make this country an object of shame and ridicule. Far from attempting to curb these excesses, the Government has seemed intent on encouraging them, allowing 24-hour drinking, cheap alcohol and the widespread advertising of liquor, some of it clearly aimed at the young.

Today []The Times reports that the Prime Minister's review of 24-hour drinking laws has pulled back from any notion of abolishing them.[] There is, apparently, no clear correlation between the new continental-style regulations and increased crime in or around pubs. Or rather, there has been an increase in crime, but the evidence linking it to opening hours is unclear. Instead there will be some moves to enforce the law against selling alcohol to minors, and an attempt to tackle binge drinking.

It's a tall order. Binge drinking is now a national addiction — and one that is not only tolerated but encouraged. What RLS would have been thunderstruck by is the way that the Victorian hostility to alcoholic excess (however often violated) has been replaced by a celebration of the inebriated state. A generation weaned on the baby-boomer tendencies of the Sixties and Seventies now demands a skinful as its right and regards the process of becoming regularly “blootered” not as an occupational hazard, but as a regular objective. The horrors of drunkenness, which most of us learn through stomach-heaving experience, are embraced as a way of life.

They are also, of course, a way of death, most commonly in the home, where domestic violence, fuelled by alcohol, is on the increase, and where children, younger and younger, are learning from their parents that drinking spirits, whether in the form of alcopops, cheap vodka, or Buckfast, a tonic wine produced by monks in Devon and drunk on the streets of Glasgow, is a rite of passage.

How, then, do you tackle this deep-seated, if recently acquired, devotion to strong drink? Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, believes that one way is to place alcohol in the same category as drugs and tackle it as a danger to society. In the course of it, he notes the yawning gap between our attitudes to drugs, which are illegal, and alcohol and tobacco, which are not. In Scotland, for instance, 13,000 people died from tobacco-related use in 2004 while 2,052 died as a result of alcohol. Illegal drugs, meanwhile, accounted for only 356 deaths — yet the maximum penalty for possessing a Class A drug is 14 years in prison while supplying it carries a life term.

Mr Brunstrom's views are controversial because he advocates legalising drugs. But he is consistent in pointing out that we should judge them and all other addictive substances on the basis of how much they harm society and what the best way is of reducing their use.

There is a solution. It is long-term, fraught with obstacles, and a severe challenge to the national revenue, but it is achievable: to change the national culture and social attitudes in the same way as happened with tobacco. Most big cities have now banned smoking in public places (Berlin and Paris are the latest recruits); duty on tobacco has soared; every packet of cigarettes carries a lurid health warning. The same could happen with alcohol which, down the years, has escaped punitive tax and is now almost ludicrously cheap. Under the new regime, drink would become more expensive, licences would be punitively hard to get, and pubs would be barred from alcohol promotion, and would revert to becoming drinking dens, rather than places of entertainment. Most important of all, society would be encouraged to turn its back on heavy drinking, just as it now frowns on smoking.

If this sounds heavy-handed and Victorian, then so be it. It may not do much for this generation, but there is another coming along which deserves our protection, and the Victorians knew all about that. Perhaps we should relearn the old music-hall lament that ran: “Don't sell no more drink to my father/ It makes him so strange and so wild./ Don't sell no more drink to my father,/ But pity a poor orphan child.”

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