It’s well known that Scottish people love their Buckfast and they go absolutely out of their minds when they drink it, but I don’t think any of us realised just quite how shocking an effect it was having on the crime rate up there.

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Thanks to this latest report from The Scottish Prison Report, we now have a very clear idea though. They discovered that the drink was linked with 40% of arrests in Scotland, which is even more shocking a statistic when you also consider that sales of the drink only make up 0.5% of all alcohol sales in the country. Imagine if that figure was higher for a second.

The crimes that are committed are usually violent as the drink is well known for making people achieve ‘a different kind of drunk’ mainly due to the fact that a bottle is 15% alcohol and contains as much caffeine as eight cans of Coke. Many of these crimes occur in an area now known as ‘the Buckfast Triangle’, featuring the towns of Airdrie, Bellshill and Coatbridge.

Indeed, Coatbridge only has a population of 40,000 yet makes up 10% of Buckfast sales in the country. Probably don’t want to stay over if you’re in the area.

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Sheriff Alastair Brown from Dundee said the following about the deadly drink, after a teenager was found to have drunk two and a half litres of the stuff before attacking someone:

There is a very definite association between Buckfast and violence.

Those of us who have practised in any capacity anywhere in the west of Scotland have been particularly aware of that but I’ve seen it in this court as well, and also in Dundee High Court.

The facts are there to see, but it doesn’t seem like the Buckfast industry is going to slow down any time soon – that’s because it’s making nearly £9 million a year. Just do us a favour and try and drink it responsibly and not go mental next time you indulge, yeah?

For more Buckfast, check out what this guy ended up doing on a Buckfast binge. Beyond belief to be honest.