The gin craze that caused havoc among the poor in 18th-century London was a government creation. Selling more gin helped to prop up grain prices. Encouraging people to drink was, therefore, part of an economic plan. And it worked. Daniel Defoe applauded the growth of the distilling industry and suggested it would lead to a new era of prosperity. What they had not expected was that it would also rot the moral fibre of the working class. By the time Defoe changed his mind and urged new laws to curb the sale of gin, it was too late.

Hogarth's famous engraving Gin Lane, drawn in 1751, did not exaggerate. The drunken mother, her baby sliding from her arms into the canal, the lunatic driven mad by gin, the starved ex-soldier, his last possessions pawned to buy drink, the orphaned child, the fighting cripples on the street, the suicidal shopowner, all of them were victims of cheap alcohol and all of them were based on the grim statistics of real life at that time.

See any parallels with modern Britain? Of course not. For one thing, we do not drink to escape the grinding squalor of poverty. The couple who sank into an alcoholic stupor last weekend, leaving their children unprotected, were on holiday in the Algarve, not starving in the East End of London. The drunken vandals who kicked a father to death in Warrington last year were not short of money, only humanity. The epidemic of alcohol that has turned our towns and cities into a running embarrassment to the nation stems not from deprivation but from some deeper social flaw that we seem incapable of mending.

One thing, however, that was true then, remains true today - and it must, surely, be the starting point for any attempt to tackle alcohol abuse. Strong drink is cheap, available and laughably easy to buy, thanks to the power of the drinks industry, which has become as important to the leisure economy as distilling gin was to agriculture in the 18th century. It means that governments are reluctant to tackle the issue at source. It has stalled the process of taking serious steps to restrict the selling of alcohol. And it makes even minor efforts to impose restrictions unpopular. More than a third of councils in Scotland, for instance, have not suspended a shop licence in the past five years for selling alcohol to under-age drinkers.

Yet it is at the local level - the sharp end of our booze culture - that effective action can, and has been, taken. Later this week a small but significant experiment in the village of Armadale in West Lothian comes to an end. For the past six weeks, no one under 21 has been able to buy alcohol from off licences between 5pm and 10pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Every licence-holder signed up the experiment, which requires anyone young enough to arouse suspicion to provide proof of identity. The results have been dramatic. The number of calls to the police reporting vandalism by youths has come down by half, and cases of assault have reduced by 57 per cent. Two other neighbouring villages were included to prevent the crime circle simply moving to other areas. Police and local councillors think it has been a success, and there are plans to extend it.

There are other examples: Botchergate in Carlisle, where barriers go up at weekends to prevent cars driving in; hardly a radical move, but it seems that simply making it more difficult to gain access to town centre pubs has reduced the level of crime - though the traders, of course, hate it. Humberside Police discovered that more than 30 per cent of drink-related crime in Scunthorpe took place in 0.2 per cent of the town centre area, so they brought in a “cumulative impact” policy, which restricted the number of licensed premises and imposed heavy conditions on new ones. Although this runs exactly counter to current government policy, it seems to be working. In North Somerset, a police initiative aimed at tight control of licensed premises recently won an award as the most effective means of reducing crime in the area.

All of these small initiatives have one thing in common - they make it harder, not easier, to purchase alcohol. That may not sound a revolutionary approach, but it is surprisingly effective. In some ways, the restrictions are reminiscent, in miniature, of the steps taken by British governments in the last century, who not only regulated pubs, they ran them - mostly in naval ports, where the risk of drunken or mutinous sailors meant that controlling the sale of alcohol was a matter of national security.

No government today would ever contemplate such action, and I can imagine the snarls of the libertarians if they tried to do so; it has become routine to describe any attempt to regulate private behaviour as evidence of the “nanny state”. But we have reached a point where private standards have become a national scandal. When visiting tourists describe negotiating our town centres as a danger to life and limb; when the cost of crime and drink-related illness is calculated at £20 billion a year; when getting “wasted” every weekend is regarded as a legitimate, not to say essential, leisure activity, then standing back and doing nothing is not a serious option.

I am glad to say that Samuel Johnson agreed. Contemplating the horrors wrought by the gin epidemic, he wrote: “What is to be done under these melancholy circumstances? Shall we still countenance the distillery, for the sake of the revenue; out of tenderness to the few, who will suffer by its being abolished; for fear of the madness of the people; or that foreigners will run it in upon us? There can be no evil so great as that we now suffer...”

The good doctor's solution? “I would really propose,” he wrote, “that [gin] should be sold only in quart bottles, sealed up, with the king's seal, with a very high duty, and none sold without being mixed with a strong emetic.” Ah, those were the days.

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