Don't look at the deaths! Minimum pricing in Wales

Minimum pricing in Wales has been a failure. It was introduced in April 2020 and was therefore confounded by the pandemic, but the rise in alcohol-specific deaths in Wales during Covid was statistically indistinguishable from that of England (and smaller than that of Scotland, which has had minimum pricing since 2018). Anyone who reads the official evaluation in full will be left in no doubt that it failed to achieve its objective while creating negative consequences in a highly predictable way.

It takes a lot to put lipstick on this pig, but Colin Angus and colleagues have had a go with this new study. Colin Angus, you may fondly recall, is a long-standing member of the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group that has earned a small fortune in government grants to produce worthless modelling for this policy.

His new study is careful to ignore mortality. The only mention of death comes when he falsely claims that Scotland saw "a 13.4 % reduction in alcohol-specific deaths" after minimum pricing was introduced. Instead, he reckons there has been a decline in the sale of alcohol sales and that there have been "substantial effects amongst some drinkers, showcasing the policy's effectiveness in discouraging purchases of cheap, high-strength beverages".

 

The study concludes that the MUP in Wales has successfully reduced alcohol purchases and consumption of high-strength alcohol, in a way that is consistent with what we would expect, with the biggest impacts on products such as cider that are bought disproportionately by heavier drinkers.

 

So why did the number of deaths shoot up? Could it be that 'public health' dogma is wrong? The pandemic proved, in all sorts of ways, that it is.

 

In the abstract's conclusion (but, interestingly, not in the study itself) a further claim is made:

 

MUP in Wales changed purchasing behaviour, which should lead to public health benefits in the longer term.

 

Here we see the goalposts shifting. If the benefits are in the long-term then we shouldn't expect to see anything in the short-term. And yet we were very definitely and explicitly told to expect benefits almost immediately. That was the message of at least three modelling studies the Sheffield team conducted for the Welsh government. The most recent of these was published in 2018 and clearly showed a reduction in mortality in the first year which increases over time.

We know, unequivocally, that alcohol-related deaths did not fall. They rose. And yet we are told that alcohol consumption fell and that the sale of strong booze declined. We are even told that this shows that minimum pricing in Wales has been a success.

Pandemic or not, that is the elephant in the room. There are three possible explanations. Either Angus's data is wrong and sales didn't decline, or high-strength alcohol isn't linked to alcohol-specific deaths, or minimum pricing didn't reduce alcohol consumption amongst people who are prone to dying from alcohol abuse. I find the last of these by far the most persuasive, but 'public health' dogma insists that what matters is overall alcohol consumption and the overall consumption of high-strength products in particular. It is a false assumption and models based on false assumptions are bound to be wrong.

Speaking of models...

 

The findings suggest potential applicability of a similar policy for products with analogous issues, such as certain high-sugar foods.

 

Is that a fresh grift I see on the horizon?