The English ruling class at play

The Brits I drank with stuck away a lot of booze, but held it perfectly well -- unlike their Cambridge undergraduate countrymen.

That's because they were likely hard drinkers who had been doing it for decades as opposed to young people who haven't built up the tolerance. Many alcoholics build up a "tolerance" for alcohol that makes them appear functional because, well, they've been drinking a lot for a long time. They really aren't all that functional--they'd have a hard time driving and doing things requiring fine motor skills--and who knows what they are like when they get home after knocking back all the booze at the pub.

English student: "They've just finished one of the hardest and most demanding experiences in existence."

What, university education? Not going to war, giving birth, working down the pit ... ?!

About genetics: I'd have to see some hard data about this. I suspect that most differences are cultural. Native Americans probably drink to excess because of their dispirited lives, and, to a lesser degree, that applies to the ex-industrial working class in places like the UK, and most of the population in Russia, etc.

Within Europe, there also tends to be a marked increase in problem drinking as you go north - this could be genetic, it could be the depressing winters, or it could be the replacement of wine with beer, and then with spirits (eg. whisky-drinking Scotland is worse than beer-drinking England, which is worse than wine-drinking France). Having said that, France has a very high rate of medical alcoholism, but this doesn't have the socially chaotic effect that it does in the UK.

I'm also a bit sceptical about the abstemiousness of East Asians. I lived in Japan for a long time, and people there tend to be extremely hard drinkers, even by English standards. There is also extreme tolerance for drunken behaviour - the fact of drunkenness is seen to excuse men touching women up, and that sort of thing. Also, every office has a senior member who is a completely nonfunctional alcoholic, drinking whisky continually every afternoon, but it's almost impossible to sack senior personnel in Japanese companies. However, drink seems to make Japanese men lecherous, loud and objectionable, but not actually violent. These types of cultural difference are difficult to unravel.

Rombald, if you've spent even a day in Japan or anywhere else in Asia, you must surely have noticed the high percentage of people who literally turn purple after two sips of alcohol. They feel very unwell after that point, hate drinking as a result, and avoid it as much as they can. Yes, it is odd that the population with this number of people intolerant of alcohol--nobody said anything about abstemiousness--should also be the one with the most enforced amount of social drinking, but it is; I've seen it all over Asia.