The recent argument about BuzzBallz in the UK is revealing. They are sweet, brightly packaged ready-to-drink cocktails: playful in appearance, high strength, like shots of alcohol on the shelves of supermarkets. Alcohol charities have raised concerns about price, youth appeal, TikTok visibility and promotion around student culture.
This debate is not new; I recall very similar arguments deployed around so called ‘alco-pops’ in the 1990’s. The question is why this is still the offer: alcohol made more colourful, sweeter, cheaper and easier to consume. The obvious answer is that the drinks industry needs to recruit the next generation, but what do those prospective customers think about it?
Gen Z drink less than their parents and there is a lazy idea that they are simply less interested in pleasure. I doubt that. They aren’t puritans. Gen Z still want ritual, confidence, release and shared experience. What has changed is the surrounding culture. Younger people are more conscious of, anxiety, cost, fitness, emotional regulation and control. Recent US research suggests other shifts too. The Survey Centre on American Life found that 27% of young men aged 18–29 say drinking alcohol is morally wrong. One suspects that this reflects a generation who are increasingly familiar with the familial and social consequences of drinking.
Gen Z also socialise differently, but they aren’t alone; Millennials, Gen X, and yes, even boomers like me socialise less often, our lives increasingly mediated through screens.
As a psychopharmacologist, I think some of Gen Z’s caution is sensible. Alcohol is a drug. Its early effects can reduce inhibition and tension, but ethanol is a messy molecule. It does not stop at calm. It affects reward, mood, judgement, and memory. The desired effect is often narrow; the biological footprint is very wide.
But I also think something important can be lost if alcohol is treated only as a toxin or a moral failure. Humans have used alcohol for a very long time, not because we are fools, but because it has served real social purposes. Some anthropologists even argue that beer, rather than bread, helped drive the agricultural revolution. Throughout human history alcoholic drinks were not merely indulgences. They were payment, ritual, medicine, currency, safer hydration, and above all, a way of bringing people together.
So, Gen Z may be right to be sceptical of alcohol, but we should be careful not to throw away the social function it serves. In an age of loneliness, private screens and shrinking communal life, we need more shared rituals, not fewer.
The answer is not to make drinking brighter, sweeter and stronger, but to make socialising richer, more accessible and less harmful.
