Temperance 2.0

There's another very good article at Points (the blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society) by Henry Yeomans, who wrote a wonderful article about the moral panic of binge-drinking a few years ago (referenced in this blog post).

Yeomans looks at the growth of "total consumption theory" which says that "the distinction of “responsible” and “irresponsible” drinking is fatuous, as the reduction of all forms of drinking is linked to decreases in harm".

It is true that there is often a correlation between high per capita alcohol consumption and high rates of alcohol-related harm, which leads some to call for supply-side measures that affect the whole population. This happens to be what the temperance movement has always believed and I entirely agree with Yeomans that we are seeing a return of traditional temperance, albeit not gospel temperance but medical temperance.

Although the current Government’s rhetoric is consistent with consequentialism, the growth of TCT and the imminence of minimum pricing suggest we are seeing a reversion back to the older, temperance-inspired faith in the inherently problematic nature of alcohol. Nowadays, this position tends to be justified in reference to medical, epidemiological, and demographic data, yet there is clear congruity with older discursive forces.

This can be seen in the general problematisation of all forms of drinking, which was initially advanced by Victorian temperance groups, as well as the historical lineage of certain groups. The Alcohol Health Alliance (AHA) has been the primary agency involved in the campaign for minimum pricing and it includes prohibitionist groups, such as the International Order of Good Templars and the Institute of Alcohol Studies, as well as medical organisations. The British temperance movement continues, therefore, to have some influence over the way in which alcohol is understood and regulated in England and Wales.

There is an obvious problem with total consumption theory in that alcoholics/problem drinkers/binge-drinkers consume a disproportionate amount of alcohol. A nation with a lot of "irresponsible" drinkers is likely to have a high per capita rate, but it does not follow that measures which reduce consumption amongst the moderate majority will reduce harm. On the contrary, policies which treat everybody as if they were at equal risk (as implied by the silly claim that there is "no safe alcohol limit") do not only punish the majority for the 'sins' of the minority, but they fail to give adequate support to those who are genuinely at risk.

Part of the problem, in my view, is that the neo-temperance movement bases now its strategy on the anti-smoking movement (the Alcohol Health Alliance appeared soon after the SmokeFree Coalition successfully lobbied for the smoking ban and blatantly emulates it), but while the anti-tobacconists can justifiably view any reduction in consumption and/or prevalence as progress, the situation with alcohol is more complex. However, complexity, moderation and harm reduction do not sit easily with moral entrepreneurship and so they are being jettisoned in favour of an approach that views alcohol as basically evil. I predict that the drinking guidelines will be reduced to zero in the next decade to 'send out a clear message'.

The temperance movement will, however, face the old problem that their policies are not very popular.

Naturally it is politically preferable for the Coalition to garner mass support for their policies, yet the political advantages may be eroded in the long term if apparently responsible drinkers find they have to either drink less or pay more. If the ‘responsible drinkers’ of Britain do indeed unite behind minimum pricing, they may soon find that they have more to lose than the social problems associated with binge drinking.

Do go read the whole thing.


UPDATE

I'm grateful to Yeomans for pointing me to this article from 2009 in which Andrew Lansley, like Gordon Brown, rejected minimum pricing, then being demanded by Liam Donaldson.

The shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley, said: "Sir Liam Donaldson's report is a frank admission that the government's alcohol strategy has failed. The government's response to his report is another example of Labour's confusion and incoherence.

"If there was an ounce of leadership from Labour ministers on this issue there would be no need for Liam Donaldson to try his shock tactics to kick-start government policy."

He also made it clear that the Tories had no intention of putting the chief medical officer's proposal into practice.

He added: "There is clearly a need for action. But it is very important to recognise that to deal with this problem we need to deal with people's attitudes and not just the supply and price of alcohol.

"Our proposals, which include measures to tackle loss-leader promotions and higher taxes on high-alcohol drinks aimed at young people, would address this without penalising the majority of moderate drinkers. This would seem to be a much better route to go down than distorting the whole drinks market."

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Sarah Wollaston misled the House

Dick Puddlecote rightly applauds Philip Davies (Con) and Eric Joyce (Lab) for standing up to that appalling Tory paternalist Sarah "let them drink champagne" Wollaston (Doctor's Party) yesterday. Sadly the rest of the MPs demonstrated why the public holds them in such contempt. I considered fisking the whole debate but it is late and it would be exhausting to take on every politician who misled the House. Did I say "misled the House"? That's parliamentary euphemism. They lied. They lied again and again, and if they didn't know they were lying, they're too stupid to be public servants and should be sacked anyway.

Tim Worstall has already picked up on the implicit belief that minimum pricing will raise the dead from their graves. A cretin named Valerie Vaz (whose speech has to be seen to be believed) made the absurd, unsourced claim that "the police ... have to clear up the mess on Saturday evenings at a cost of £13 billion." The bizarre myth that minimum pricing will cost moderate drinkers only £12 a year was repeatedly cited, and when Wollaston took the floor she showed herself to be incapable of understanding the difference between private and public costs, tangible and intangible costs, and internalities and externalities.

Sarah Wollaston (Totnes, Conservative): What about taxpayers? The cost of the epidemic is out of control. It is at least £20 billion...

Really? The actual cost to the taxpayer is "at least £20 billion"? Just to make sure that wasn't a slip of the tongue, let's look at Wollaston's op-ed at Politics Home yesterday...

Mortality is increasing and also the cost to tax payers; at least £20billion.

Yup, that's what she claims and that is what she told the mother of all parliaments. This would be a reference to the British Cabinet Office report of 2003 which found a total social cost of around £18-20 billion.

Of these costs, £4.7 billion were intangible costs (ie. they are hypothetical - they do not need to be paid by anyone, let alone the taxpayer).

A further £5.5 billion were lost productivity costs which, again, do not represent a bill that needs to be paid.

A further £5.1 billion were private costs related to crime which, once again, do not need to be recouped through the tax system, and the author of the report stressed repeatedly that these costs were at the absolute top end of any realistic estimate.

The only costs which can be considered as "to the taxpayer" are £1.7 billion in healthcare and £2.2 billion in crime and punishment, but since the exchequer receives £9 billion a year in alcohol duty, that hardly makes a compelling case for a compensatory sin tax, does it? (Minimum pricing, as currently proposed, would not compensate the treasury in any case.)

...but if we look at the finer details of the impact on productivity, we will see that the evidence given to the Health Committee when it looked at this issue showed that the cost could be as high as £55 billion

This a reference to a report from the National Social Marketing Centre (Lister, 2007) which sadly is not available online, but I have a copy as I requested it last year.

£16.1 billion of these 'costs' are intangible—imaginary evaluations of life years forgone.

£5 billion are private healthcare costs.

£5.8 billion are private costs related to crime.

£8 billion is the amount spent on "misused" alcohol by consumers (yes, the money drinkers spend on drink is counted as a cost to the taxpayer in Wollaston's world).

Your "lost productivity" makes up £7.3 billion, but who pays this? At a push you could say the drinker pays it, but it's really just income forgone so nobody pays it. Certainly, the taxpayer is not left to pick up the bill. Even in the loosest definition, this is a further cost to the drinker, not the state.

This leaves £6.6 billion as a legitimate cost to the taxpayer. That figure is highly inflated for various reasons and does not include any benefits from alcohol, but it still remains lower than the £9 billion received by the treasury in alcohol duty. So even using these highly dubious figures, drinkers are subsidising teetotallers. From a purely economic standpoint, Wollaston should be petitioning for a maximum unit price.

I have much, much more to say on the subject of crooked cost-to-society estimates and will do so in a paper for the ASI in April. Every figure given by politicians and pressure groups which purport to show the cost of obesity, drinking and smoking wrongly portrays intangible private costs as financial public costs and portrays expenditure by consumers as a cost 'to society'. They are riddled with double-counting, they conspicuously fail to include benefits (such as duty paid) and they are designed only for advocacy.

But as bad as they are, none of the researchers who compile them would ever claim that alcohol costs the taxpayer anything close to £20 billion, let alone £55 billion.

And that is just one of the reasons why Sarah Wollaston misled lied to the House on Tuesday.


UPDATE:


Still more ignorant is Kevin Barron, who said in the House last year:

We took evidence that the cost to the NHS could be as high as £55 billion a year.

Considering the entire NHS budget was £106 billion in 2011/12, you'd have to be out of your mind to think that £55 billion was spent on alcohol-related diseases. In fact, the high-end estimate is just £2.7 billion.

The situation is similar to that with tobacco: in the end, no one really knows the cost of the use of these products.

Especially our elected representatives...


PS. Eric Crampton has done some outstanding work picking these cost-of-drinking studies apart. This must-read paper relates to Australia and New Zealand but the dodgy methods are just the same as those used in the UK. (Short version here.)

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Repetition, repetition, repetition

Knock, knock, knock at the door they go—the incessant whining designed to make the government sigh and give in, with the forlorn hope that maybe they'll finally shut up and go away. We saw it with the smoking ban. We saw it with banning below-cost alcohol.

And do they ever shut up and go away?

They do not.

Ban cut-price alcohol to save lives, leading doctors warn

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, medical experts urge the Government to take “bold action” and follow the lead of Scotland by bringing in minimum prices for drinks.

Firstly, writing a letter to the Telegraph shouldn't be considered front page news, even in the Telegraph.

Secondly, quit it with this "bold action" stuff will you? You tried it last month...

The British Medical Association (BMA) is calling on ministers to bring in the "bold and courageous" ban for reasons of health rather than road safety.

There's nothing bold about putting up tax and banning things. It's cowardly and self-serving. Your attempts at flattery are nauseating and your cynicism is transparent.

Sir Ian [Gilmore—for it is he] is calling for a return to the higher prices of 20 years ago, when alcohol was about 50 per cent more expensive in real terms.

Does anybody understand what 'real terms' means any more? It means 'after adjustment for inflation', not 'compared with average wages'. As I never tire of pointing out, the Office for National Statistics has looked into this and concluded:

Between 1980 and 2008, the price of alcohol increased by 283.3%. After considering inflation (at 21.3%), alcohol prices increased by 19.3% over the period.

Actually, I do tire of pointing this out, so please stop it.

New figures were made public last week showing that twice as many people were being treated in hospital because of alcohol compared with 10 years ago.

New figures?! You must be kidding. The "twice as many people being treated in hospital because of alcohol" story appears more often than the crossword. It's done the rounds three times this year alone (in February, May and December).

In addition to reporting this "news" last week, the Telegraph reported it in May and August—using the same photo to illustrate it on each occasion. It was first reported back in 2008 and has appeared with unfathomable regularity ever since.

The repetition of the 'hospital admissions double' canard (and it is a canard) epitomises the campaign for minimum pricing, which is based on nothing more than a relentless, circling PR exercise by the UK Alcohol Health Alliance modelled on the smoking ban campaign. There is nothing in the article or the accompanying letter of any interest. None of it is new. It is the same hysterical half-truths masquerading as news.

And so, in the absence of anything interesting to write about, I will use the occasion to launch my new leisurewear collection. The Snowdon Winter 2011 collection includes two high quality white t-shirts (other colours are available) featuring simple but lovingly designed motifs which will give the wearer years of satisfaction.

Order now to avoid disappointment.

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A little taste of prohibition

Dec. 1920: Prohibition agents show off 89 confiscated stills.
(From here)

From The Morning Advertiser:

Five men who masterminded a major counterfeit vodka manufacturing and bottling plant in Leicestershire, were sentenced to a total of 17 years and ten months on Friday at Hull Crown Court.

The plot was uncovered in an industrial unit by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) when they carried out raids in September 2009. They seized 9,000 bottles of fake vodka, branded as Glen’s, manufacturing equipment, bottles and counterfeit packaging – labels and cardboard boxes, at the remote industrial unit at Moscow Farm near Great Dalby, Leicestershire.

The court heard there was a complete lack of any fire safety measures which posed a serious and life threatening hazard. The alcohol vapour alone could have triggered a major explosion if the lights had been switched on or a naked flame or cigarette had been lit.

It certainly could. You may recall what happened back in July...

Boston fire blast unit producing illegal vodka

An industrial unit in Lincolnshire, where five men were killed in an explosion, was being used to produce illegal vodka, police have confirmed.

This happened in Boston, England in 2011, by the way, not Boston, Massachusetts in 1921. Easy mistake to make.

This is part of a growing trend, as the UK's sky-high alcohol taxes combine with economic hardship to fuel demand for the black market. Half of all rolling tobacco is smuggled into the country. Counterfeit cigarettes are openly sold in the streets. We've got the smoke-easies (last week I was in a pub in central London where the landlord told people to light up and leave their cigarette stubs on the floor). Now we have criminal gangs producing poisonous moonshine and blowing themselves up with illegal stills. All we need now is Elliott Ness dancing the Charleston and we can have a full-blown 1920s revival.

The neo-prohibitionist fools believe they can avoid the consequences of prohibition so long as society falls short of a total ban. That's now how it works. It's a sliding scale. In The Art of Suppression I write about 'little prohibitions'—bans, price hikes, excessive regulations—which cause the same problems, only on a smaller scale. After all, as John Stuart Mill said: "Every increase of cost is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price."

Still, at least people aren't getting literally blinded by moonshine like they did during Prohibition.

No, wait. They are.

25p vodka made me go blind

Christmas partygoers have been warned off bargain booze that can leave you blind. Eastern European gangs are flooding corner stores and even going door to door selling illicit drink in a £1billion- a-year trade.

Last night trainee accountant Dale Shaw, 27, told how he nearly lost his sight drinking the dodgy liquor. After being invited to a family party, Dale bought a bottle of Drop Vodka from an off-licence in Bradford, West Yorkshire.

He said: “I’d never heard of the brand before but it was £4 cheaper than the others. After downing a quarter of the bottle, Dale began to feel more drunk than usual and his vision began to blur.

But by the next morning he could not see at all and was suffering excruciating pains in the lower half of his body. “As soon as I woke I knew there was something wrong,” he said. “I was in agony and my sight was almost completely gone.”

Dale was taken by a relative to Bradford Royal Infirmary where a doctor immediately recognised he was being poisoned by the bootleg spirits. The cut-price vodka contained methanol – alcohol used in explosives, anti-freeze and racing car fuel – and not the safe ethanol found in legal booze.

Expect much more of this if Alcohol Concern and the BMA get their way.

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Big Alcohol = Big Tobacco

A bit more schadenfreude for the nonsmoking drinkers who applaud the anti-smoking campaign while expecting their own vice to be left alone. As I said yesterday in relation to quisling pub supremo Ted Tuppen...

Do you really think it is wise, as the head of a pub company, to equate alcohol with cigarettes? There are enough temperance nuts doing that already without you helping them out.

Five years ago this would have been outrageous hyperbole, but things move pretty quickly in 'public' health. Five years ago I don't recall anyone ever seriously using the term 'Big Alcohol'. Big Tobacco, sure. Big Oil, sometimes. But 'Big Alcohol'—not so much.

That's all changing.

How's that for guilt by association? Alcohol Concern Wales—for it is they—have created a document which contrasts statements from the tobacco industry with statements from the alcohol industry. They're both the same, doncha see?

The logic here is lame even by temperance standards. They take no account of whether the statements might be true, for a start. They have dredged the internet and found comments that are roughly similar and that is enough for them.

And when I say roughly similar, I mean similar as in they're both spoken in English and involve words. Take this, for example....

“The Lorillard Tobacco Company today announced the launch of a nationwide youth smoking prevention programme. This...is in addition to the funds Lorillard and other companies have committed to the...youth smoking prevention and education programme.”
Lorillard Tobacco Company Press Release (1999)

“It is only through education, coupled with targeted interventions against misusers, that we can ultimately change the drinking culture...”
David Poley, Chief Executive of the Portman Group (2010)

Uncanny, eh? A tobacco company announces the launch of a youth smoking prevention programme (as it was required to do under the Master Settlement Agreement) and the Portman Group announces that, er, education and targeted interventions are essential to change the drinking culture. Both statements include the words "education" and "the". It's really quite spooky.

Or take this...

“[Increasing the price of cigarettes] discriminates against those who can least afford it. Increasing tobacco duty could cost the government billions of pounds...The Chancellor said the government’s policy on tobacco will reduce smoking. It’s not the government’s role to force people to quit.”
Simon Clark, Director of smokers’ lobby group Forest (2011)

“It is worrying that in the midst of a recession, when sales and consumption of alcohol are falling, that the Government should be talking about raising prices for all consumers, at a time when many are already struggling to make ends meet.”
Jeremy Beadles, Chief Exec. of the Wine and Spirit Trade Association (2009)

Let's take the first quote. Clark is saying that cigarette taxes are regressive (clearly true), that very high prices increase smuggling (also true) and that it is not the government's job to force people to stop smoking (a moral question, but a valid opinion).

Beadles, however, is simply saying that increasing the price of a product used by 90% of the population during a recession will make people worse off. He is not referring to the poor, to smuggling, nor to whether the government should be trying to stop people drinking.

These comments have very little in common except they refer to taxes. In the minds of Alcohol Concern, however, any industry that opposes tax hikes on its products is following the Big Tobacco template. As they say on their 'glancesheet' ('Glantz sheet'?):

This glancesheet shows how arguments previously put forward by tobacco companies and lobbyists, to delay or prevent tighter regulation of the industry, have now been adopted by the alcohol industry to protect its own interests.

There should be a version of Godwin's Law for anyone who resorts to comparing an industry with the tobacco industry for rhetorical purposes, with extra marks for using the word 'Big' (capitalised, natch). To the neo-prohibitionists, any industry that dares to challenge them is "recycling Big Tobacco arguments" and, therefore, can be ignored.

The irony is that there is a template being copied here and it is being copied very precisely. The temperance lobby is demonising industry, demanding higher taxes, calling for a total ban on advertising, playing the 'think of the children' card, using junk statistics and talking about 'passive drinking'.

Now who did they get from, I wonder?

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Don't panic

I've got an article over at The Independent today covering many of the facts about alcohol of which readers of this blog will be familiar, but politicians seemingly are not.

Yes, we are drinking more than we did in the immediate post-war years. An economic depression sandwiched by two world wars reduced alcohol consumption to the lowest in our history, but austerity Britain can hardly be considered a typical reference point. Using more relevant benchmarks, we are drinking less than we did in 1914 and very much less than we did in previous centuries. We are drinking only marginally more than we did thirty years ago and—here is a seldom spoken truth—we are drinking less than we did in 2002.

Yes, there are millions of us who exceed our ‘daily limits’ (they’re actually weekly guidelines). How could we not? These guidelines were not based on any real evidence when they were set in 1987 and methodological changes have since dragged several million more of us over the line of ‘hazardous drinking’. Limits that do not allow for tipsiness, let alone drunkenness, deserve to be ignored and yet the percentage of men and women drinking above the ‘limits’ has still been falling for a decade, with the largest decline seen amongst young men.

By comparison with our European neighbours, we are firmly mid-table in the alcohol consumption stakes, behind France, Germany and Spain and far behind the Czech Republic and Luxembourg. In terms of alcohol taxation, however, we are Champions League contenders. The UK has the second highest excise duty on wine, the third highest excise duty on beer and the fourth highest excise duty on spirits. ‘Rip-off Britain’, perhaps, but hardly ‘Boozy Britain’.

The comments are generally positive. Do go have a read.

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Some real research into alcohol

In August, former British Medical Journal editor Richard Smith discussed an encounter with two sociologists. The topic of discussion was 'binge-drinking' and the role of parents. One of the sociologists was his daughter. She was unsurprisingly against "tough love" from parents. The other was this person:

A much older sociologist at the lunch said that it was fashionable to blame parents for everything and that there wasn’t good evidence of the influence of parenting.

This sentence tells you quite a lot about sociologists. It might help explain why sociology is treated with such disdain by a large section of the public (unfairly, IMHO). It is, I think, blindingly obvious that the people who raise you have a profound influence on your character, prospects and behaviour. If "older sociologists" dispute this it is perhaps because their horizons have never extended much beyond school and university. (There is an amusing video of a sociologist describing her experience of going to Las Vegas after the American Sociological Association accidentally held their annual convention there.)

More importantly, ideological axe-grinders—of whom there are many in sociology—like to blame problems on things that they can change by force of law. Why focus on important but complex issues like parenting and education when you can focus on simple but trivial issues like advertising and pricing?

Activists, neo-prohibitionists and anti-capitalists are much happier blaming the corporations and the institutions, man, than looking at the real factors behind excessive drinking and alcoholism.

I dislike and distrust 'alcohol control' partly because I put a high value on freedom but also because I strongly believe that their broadbrush stategy is ineffective, costly and harmful, since it ignores the real issues. It is a neo-prohibitionist population-level response when it should be a targeted response to the minority who need help.

Considering how implausible it is that corporations could mould minds in ways that friends and family cannot, it is remarkable how entrenched is the view that parenting has only a minor influence on behaviour. Both nature (genetics) and nurture (parenting) have been downplayed in academia since the 1960s to such an extent that when the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found that family and friends are the biggest influence on drinking behaviour, they described it as an "inconvenient truth".

JRF have produced successive reports showing the same thing, most recently in June when they reported that "family and friends have a strong influence on teenagers’ drinking patterns, and are stronger influences than some other factors – such as individual well-being, celebrity figures and the media."

Well, duh, you may say. Even so, the temperance lobby managed to harness the findings for their own ends (as the Quaker teetotaller Joseph Rowntree would no doubt have wished). The ubiquitous Don Shenker said...

"Government ministers must also look at some of the causes of why it is so easy for children to obtain alcohol, usually from the home.

"Government should look to see if they've done everything they can to stop the large supermarkets from continuing to heavily promote cheap alcohol which incentivises more alcohol purchases and therefore results in more alcohol being stored in the home, blah, blah, blah..."

Note how he takes a report that discusses a deep-rooted social factor and turns it into an issue about access and pricing. It's no accident that this guy is in the lobbying business. He's good at it.

Since then, the think-tank Demos has produced a report which broadly echoes JRF's findings, but using a more sophisticated methodology and coming to a more sophisticated conclusion. JRF found a link between parent's drinking habits and those of their offspring, whereas Demos found the link with the particular types of parenting. 'Tough love', they say, is the best way to bring up a child. 'Disengaged' is the worse.

None of this should be a great surprise, as one of its authors, Jamie Bartlett, said:

This is quite intuitive. It does not mean parenting is the 'cause' of binge-drinking, as some reports have put it, or that it is the only factor. But it is important.

Note that Bartlett, unlike certain advocacy groups, has the integrity not to shout 'causation' here, even though the associations being reported are stronger than any epidemiological finding you'll read about this month.

The risk of excessive drinking at age 16 is 8.36 (836 per cent) times higher if a child’s parent has a ‘disengaged’ parenting style rather than one of ‘tough love’.

The whole report, which is now available to download, exhibits a degree of academic rigour that is rarely displayed by partisan groups and is frequently absent in the peer-reviewed literature (sadly, these two elements frequently merge together). This is a credit to Demos—and a vindication of think-tanks, which George Monbiot ludicrously believes are "crushing democracy" (because democracy would be so much better served if the people George doesn't like were silenced)—but it is also an indictment of the state of research into this, and other, contentious topics. There is a refreshing absence of an a priori conclusion in this report and, almost uniquely amongst the current literature, there are no policy demands. It's difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when ending an academic study with a political call-to-arms would have been viewed as crass and unprofessional. Demos's report takes us back to those good old days when there was a division between science and politics.

What is striking is how many unspoken facts are laid out openly from the start. Many of them are the kind of things I've been saying on this blog and elsewhere for some time. They are the facts that do not get aired on Panorama or in the newspapers.

On alcohol consumption, for example:

In strictly medical terms, binge-drinking in the UK – as measured as more than twice the recommended daily allowance of alcohol consumed in a single episode – has been falling for at least five years in a row, and is not significantly higher than in other European countries.

Indeed it has. And, as I have said before, alcohol consumption in Britain today is unexceptional both in historical terms and in relation to other wealthy nations...

UK per capita alcohol consumption is unremarkable by comparison with other countries of a comparable size and income level, and well below historic levels in the eighteenth or very early twentieth century. Moreover, the majority of the population either do not drink, or do it within the government’s lower risk limit.

There are a couple of points with which I disagree. For example...

Unfortunately, there has been a marked increase in the number of people who are unconcerned by the long-term health effects of their behaviour – and even their immediate personal safety.

I have not heard this claim before and I am not at all convinced that it is true. The reference they give does not seem to support the assertion that people are less concerned about their health and safety than previous generations. There may be research elsewhere showing this, but my own, admittedly jaded and anecdotal, view is that the people are more obsessed with long-term health and safety than ever before.

I also think the following statistic could have been treated with greater scepticism: 

There has been a steady increase in reported alcohol-related hospital admissions over the last decade. In 2009/10 there were 1.1 million admissions related to alcohol, which was an increase of 12 per cent on the previous year and around double the number in 2002/03, when there were 510,200 admissions. However, it is to be noted that the majority of alcohol-related admissions were older people, likely to be suffering from long-term alcohol misuse.

It is certainly true that the majority were old, and often very old, people. Whether they were suffering from long-term alcohol misuse is more questionable. As this eye-opening article by Nigel Hawkes explained, 'alcohol-related' hospital admissions are estimates of the crudest variety. Admissions figures are added up and then large percentages are hived off and designated 'alcohol-related'. More than half of the so-called 'alcohol-related admissions' are for hypertension and heart palpitations, and the definition of 'alcohol-related' has been expanded to such an extent in the last decade that I see the figures as being essentially useless. What we are seeing is an increase in old people going to hospital for various reasons. Tellingly, the proportion of admissions that are 'alcohol-related' has barely changed over this period. The very fact that alcohol-related hospital admissions have doubled in a decade, at a time when alcohol consumption has been falling should make us ask serious questions about the reliability of these data.

What, then, is the problem with British drinking habits? It is not one of overall alcohol consumption in the general population, but of the behavior of a minority.

However, the last decade has seen changes to the way people drink. A small, but possibly growing, number of young adults in the UK is drinking to extreme excess, often in an intentionally reckless and very public way, putting themselves and others at risk of harm – and causing considerable social and financial cost.

How much this has changed in the last decade, it is difficult to say. As the authors indicate, it is not clear whether the number of people drinking to "extreme excess" has risen at all. There is more than a hint that our recent obsession with 'binge-drinking' falls under that most useful of sociological terms, the moral panic.

With more people going to university, more disposable income, people marrying later and having children later, there are very plausible socio-economic reasons for drinking and 'binge-drinking' to be on the rise. Alcohol consumption is undoubtedly higher now than it was fifty years ago, though not higher than 100 years ago. There is also evidence of greater drunkenness than in most other countries.

The UK consumption average for a single drinking episode is the highest in Europe, and the drinkers in the UK have the fourth highest average number of drinks per day overall.

I suspect it was always thus. Northern European drinking habits and all that. But, again, this is not a question of overall alcohol consumption so much as patterns of alcohol consumption. It would be helpful if we could ditch the silly term 'binge-drinking' and return to calling it drunkenness. Or at least tipsiness, for that is all you need to be to meet the ludicrous modern definition of 'binge-drinking'.

That being the case, we believe the task at hand, and the proportionate and liberal response to binge-drinking, is to help create an environment in which people are free to drink alcohol – but behave in a responsible manner when they do.

But what, if anything, can be done? I have always maintained that pricing has the least effect on the people who most need to be targeted. (Exhibit one: the homeless.) This seems to be borne out by the data.

One study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) found that heavy drinkers are in fact likely to be the least responsive to changes in price, meaning a minimum unit price of 50 pence per unit would reduce alcohol consumption by harmful drinkers by a very small amount: around two pints of beer per week.

Sin taxes are highly regressive. It is always fascinating to see supposed left-wingers supporting regressive taxation when 'vices' are concerned, despite conclusive evidence that they widen inequality and exacerbate poverty.

The distributional impacts of minimum pricing are heavily contested, and have been questioned by a recent report by the CEBR, which argues that minimum pricing is a regressive measure because people on lower incomes typically pay more as a proportion of their income on alcohol, and will therefore be the most affected.

And if pricing really made a difference, we would expect countries which have the highest alcohol taxes—such as the UK—to have the lowest rates of binge-drinking.

The evidence on how minimum pricing would affect binge-drinking is not conclusive. Countries where excise tax on alcohol is very high also have very high levels of consumption.

In other words, the real-life evidence suggests that minimum pricing would be a futile and counterproductive endeavour. The real drivers of hazardous drinking are not price or advertising, but factors which are beyond the reach of government, and therefore of little interest to those who demand remedial legislation.

It appears that although not the only determinant of drinking behaviour among young people, parenting can and does have a dramatic effect on it. Good parenting has positive effects on young people’s drinking behaviour and there is indirect evidence that it builds the kinds of personal qualities and relationships that guard against risky behaviour in general. If there is an optimal parenting style for reducing the risks of early and excessive binge-drinking, it is the tough love, authoritative style cited above.

There is more to this report than a message of 'blame the parents'. It is rather more nuanced than that—go read the rest to see why—but nurture is clearly very important and should not be a surprise to those of us who are not "older sociologists".

Insofar as alcohol is a problem in society, it is a problem of public order and—for a small minority—an issue of addiction and health. In my experience, people who behave like idiots when drunk are idiots when sober. Drunkenness may bring this to the fore, but it is the underlying lack of respect and self-restraint that is the real problem. The nanny state panders to, and encourages, the irresponsibility and indiscipline that is at the heart of the problem. Don't blame the drug (alcohol) for these people. Blame them and, if you wish, blame their parents. As Frank Zappa once said: "A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole."

Britain has more than its fair share of assholes (these are now my views, not those of Demos, BTW). From my travels to other countries, I regard this as an incontrovertible fact. You can argue about why this is so until the cows come home. As the wildly differing reactions to the London riots demonstrated, your opinion will probably be coloured by your political views. Whatever they are, you would probably agree that the causes are complex and deep-rooted. The temperance lobby, however, portray the problem as simple, political and easy to remedy through legislation. Most of what is written about alcohol is designed to further this legislative agenda, whether on the Alcohol Concern website or in the pages of The Lancet. Politically motivated junk science takes us further from the truth and further from real answers. Demos has produced a report which looks at the issue more thoughtfully and, though it will probably be ignored by the public health lobby, it is a valuable contribution to serious discussion.

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Here comes DrinkFree Movies

When I was at University I had a friend who took American Studies. By his own admission, this academic discipline largely involved sitting around watching movies. How we used to scoff at the Mickey Mouse subject and the life of worklessness that seemed destined to follow. Little did we know that such skills would one day make him ideally suited to being a 'public health professional'.

You may already be familiar with SmokeFree Movies. Now welcome, with crushing predictability, DrinkFree Movies.

Alcohol imagery and branding, and age classification of films popular in the UK

Ailsa Lyons, Ann McNeill, Ian Gilmore, and John Britton

Methods Alcohol appearances (classified as ‘alcohol use, inferred alcohol use, other alcohol reference and alcohol brand appearances’) were measured using 5-min interval coding of 300 films, comprising the 15 highest grossing films at the UK Box Office each year over a period of 20 years from 1989 to 2008.

Conclusion Alcohol imagery is extremely common in all films popular in the UK, irrespective of BBFC age classification. Given the relationship between exposure to alcohol imagery in films and use of alcohol by young people, we suggest that alcohol imagery should be afforded greater consideration in determining the suitability of films for viewing by children and young people.

As sure as night follows day, the gathering storm of temperance follows the blueprint of anti-tobacco. It is no coincidence that three of the authors of this study are from the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies. They have joined forces with water-drinking windbag Ian Gilmore of the Alcohol Health Alliance to produce a carbon copy of the studies that Californian quackademic Stanton Glantz has been excreting for years. It is, in fact, very similar to the study produced by the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies last year, which involved many of the same personnel, but with smoking substituted for alcohol. As I said then...

And what have we learnt from this exhaustive study?

"Although smoking imagery and branding images in the most popular films have become substantially less common over the past 20 years, it is apparent children and young people watching films in the UK are still exposed to frequent and, at times, specifically branded tobacco imagery, particularly in films originating from the UK", Prof John Britton and colleagues write.

Dr John Britton—for it is he—is rapidly becoming the UK's answer to nutty professor Stanton Glantz. And if the answer is 'Stanton Glantz', the UK is asking the wrong question.

Once again, alcohol control and tobacco control are "learning from each other" (tickets for the conference are still available), and the outcome is inevitable: a campaign to censor films which show activities of which the health police disapprove.

But first, the shock findings...

At least one alcohol appearance occurred in 258 (86%) of the 300 films, with ‘alcohol use’ occurring in 215 (72%), ‘inferred alcohol use’ in 237 (79%) and ‘other reference to alcohol’ in 233 (78%).

Gosh.

The film with the greatest intensity of specific brand appearances was See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989, comedy, BBFC 15, USA) in which Budweiser appeared 13 times in bar scenes, branded neon signs and bottles of beer.

Alcohol imagery in a bar scene. whatever next?

The greatest number of separate brands occurred in Cocktail (1989, comedy, BBFC 15, USA), with 13 brands appearing a total of 39 times.

Different drinks in a film about making cocktails. Appalling.

Our finding of the high levels of exposure of children and young people to alcohol imagery in UK films, thus identifies an important and potentially avoidable influence on current and future alcohol consumption.

No, actually it hasn't. The 'study' merely shows that drinking and drink "imagery" appears occasionally in many of the top grossing films of the last fifteen years. It does not show, or even attempt to show, any link between said imagery and alcohol consumption amongst viewers of any age group. And, as the two examples given above indicate, many of the films in question are already restricted to those of 15+ or 18+ years.

Since there is no association between people watching See No Evil, Hear No Evil in their youth and later becoming alcoholics, there is no reason whatever for these latter-day Mary Whitehouses to demand that Hollywood depicts the world as they wish it to be, rather than as it is.

Since alcohol consumption is a common activity in everyday life, and bars, pubs and other alcohol retailers are an integral part of the urban environment in most Western countries, alcohol imagery in films is arguably an inevitable consequence of realistic depictions of life in these environments.

Bingo! That's exactly what it is. Now go away.

Alas, there is a "however"...

However, since branded or other alcohol imagery promotes alcohol use, there is a case for their inclusion in films to be a strong factor in age classification.

But you haven't demonstrated that alcohol imagery promotes alcohol use. Even if there was a link, it remains none of your business.

It's quite simple—it is illegal to sell alcohol to a person under the age of 18. It is not illegal for a person under the age of 18 to drink alcohol and it is certainly not illegal for a person under the age of 18 to see somebody drinking alcohol. If it's not illegal to see someone drinking in real life, why the hell should it be illegal for them to see it in a film? Watching people drinking, or seeing a sign for Budweiser, or smoking, is not going to disturb or unsettle the minds of younger viewers, even though it clearly disturbs and unsettles you. You, however, are profoundly abnormal and I fully expect the BBFC to tell you to mind your own business just like they did last time.

A BBFC spokeswoman, Sue Clark, said it had no intention of changing its policy. "These doctors are out of step with public opinion. We have asked the public specifically if smoking should be a classification or category-defining issue, and the response overwhelmingly was no, it shouldn't."

The board flags up overt smoking content through its consumer advice, the short sentence on all film advertising which warns about sexual or violent content, and also by setting out on its website the factors underlying its decision to grant a film a particular rating, she added. "It's then up to parents whether or not they stop their children seeing that film."

Get the picture? Leave us alone you prod-nose, pointy-headed, lemon-sucking puritans. Art is not there to be moulded into your propaganda.

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One born every minute

Surely the pub industry won't fall for this?

Alcohol Concern praises pubs

The chief executive of Alcohol Concern Don Shenker has praised pubs for improving community life.

Writing a column in the Society of Independent Brewers’ membership magazine Shenker expressed support for “responsible drinking” and deplores the current drinking culture that “values drinking at home over going to the pub.”

Don Shenker, leader of the country's foremost temperance group—sorry, 'alcohol control' group—wants you to believe that he supports the British pub. The bait on the fish hook is minimum pricing, which some pubs think will draw in the drinkers that the smoking ban forced out. They're wrong, and having been duped by one fake charity (ASH), they're getting ready to be tricked by another (Alcohol Con).

Alcohol Concern are trying to pitch themselves as being against drinking at home, rather than drinking per se. But let's remember that the temperance lobby has traditionally attacked the pub with fury (as you would expect) and have, if anything, been more tolerant of drinking at home. There's a reason why the Anti-Saloon League was not called the Anti-Beer League and it's the same reason anti-alcohol campaigners have always tried to limit opening times and reduce the number of pubs that can open. Pubs have always been their enemy and always will be. Every place that sells alcohol will be in the cross-hairs.

Can the pub companies really be so dumb as to be tricked by Shenker's nauseatingly insincere eulogy? This is a pressure group that wants to reduce licensing hours, lower the drink-drive limit and, only three days ago, was applauding moves to force pubs to pay still more taxes.

The late-night levy is part of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. Licensing authorities will be able to charge from £300 to nearly £4,440 depending on the premises.

...While the charity Alcohol Concern welcomes the extra charge on venues, it says it will do nothing to prevent the heavy drinking.

"The levy on the drinks industry won't actually address the root cause," said chief executive Don Shenker.

"It won't stop people necessarily from drinking too much alcohol. The way to deter people from drinking too much alcohol is to raise the price of alcohol."

Leg-Iron called this one right...

While the charity Alcohol Concern welcomes the extra charge on venues, it says it will do nothing to prevent the heavy drinking.

If it will achieve nothing, why do you welcome it, Darth? Does it make you excited to see the proles suffer for no reason at all? It does, doesn't it?

"The levy on the drinks industry won't actually address the root cause," said chief executive Don Shenker.

Then why do it? Here is the Chief Puritan himself admitting that this measure will no nothing more than put an awful lot of people out of work. Yet he welcomes that. This man is paid from your taxes, you have no means to get rid of him and he controls the Tory, Lib Dem and Labour policies on alcohol. Remember that at the next election.

The last few years have seen the pub industry lurch from one disaster to another. Five years ago they were tricked by ASH into believing the smoking ban would lead to a great Renaissance of the British boozer. Earlier this year, the Scottish Licensed Trade Association got into bed with the temperance lobby to support a minimum price for alcohol (which is now on its way). The drinks company Diageo was haplessly funding Alcohol Focus until it finally noticed that the temperance lobby is not their friend. CAMRA... well, don't even get me started on CAMRA.

And now we have Dong Shaker sneaking into the picture with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a dagger in the other. How stupid does he think they are?

Pretty stupid, actually. And he might be right...

The Society of Independent Brewers has sought to build a relationship with Alcohol Concern, having earlier this year become a corporate member of the organisation.

“Our dialogue with Alcohol Concern has revealed common ground — in particular the role played by the pub in promoting responsible drinking – which we should be using as a foundation for a joint strategy,” said Grocock.

Good grief. Better bring a long spoon to sup with. The title of the Pub Curmudgeon's post about this says it all: Granny, what big eyes you’ve got.

Alcohol Concern have found "common ground" alright, but it's not with the pub trade. Maybe the Society of Independent Brewers should pop along to their next conference...

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A million alcohol-related hospital admissions?

Last night, I was on BBC Five Live discussing the latest shock-horror alcohol admissions figures for UK hospitals (on the iPlayer from 51.00). Actually, as Mark Wadsworth noticed, there's nothing new about them. They were given to the media back in February, and then released officially in May and have now been revived in the Silly Season for no other reason than that the temperance lobby wanted to milk them one more time. Apparently it sells newspapers.

The big (old) news is that there were more than a million alcohol-related hospital admissions last year in the UK despite (and this is rarely mentioned) alcohol consumption having been in decline for the last eight years, and despite (this is never mentioned) Britain having the third highest alcohol taxes in the world. This is a doubling in admissions in less than a decade. A truly remarkable phenomenon, if true.

In my naïvité, I always imagined that it was doctors and nurses who decided whether a hospital admission was alcohol-related, but then I read this post at the always informative Straight Statistics, which explains that hospital admissions data are divided up according to various assumptions. For example, it is assumed that 20% of all stomach cancer admissions are alcohol-related, half of epilepsy admissions are alcohol-related and a quarter of admissions for extreme cold are alcohol-related.

These assumptions are based on individual epidemiological studies which may or may not reflect the true risks. Whether true or not, if a man goes to hospital complaining of hypertension, he will make up a quarter of an alcohol-related admission, even if he is a teetotaler. If he goes to hospital 8 times, he will have added two alcohol-related admissions to the statistics—remember, these are admissions, not different individuals. The system is called 'alcohol-attributable fractions' and you can read all about it here should you wish.

Having read many an epidemiological study, I am not convinced that this is the very best way to get a handle on alcohol-related harm. The NHS's figures have already been distorted improved beyond recognition in recent years. The methodology has changed, for one thing, as the Office of National Statistics acknowledges:

These figures use a new methodology reflecting a substantial change in the way the impact of alcohol on hospital admissions is calculated. Previously the calculation counted only admissions for reasons specifically related to alcohol. The new calculation, for which the methodology is described in the report, includes a proportion of the admissions for reasons that are not always related to alcohol, but can be in some instances (such as accidental injury).

The number of ailments that are categorised as 'alcohol-related' has jumped from 7 to 14 to 20 in the space of eight years:

Finished admission episodes are identified where an alcohol-related diagnosis is recorded in any of the 20 (14 from 2002/03 to 2006/07 and 7 prior to 2002/03) primary and secondary diagnosis fields in a Hospital Admission Statistics record.

As a consequence of these changes we are seeing an enormous rise in admissions that are 'partially attributable' to alcohol which would not have been considered alcohol-related in the past. And of these partially attributable admissions, the biggest growth has come from diseases of old age which are blamed on alcohol by the system of attributable fractions.

As the Portman Group has pointed out in a letter that probably won't be published, hospital admissions are rising in general, largely as a result of the ageing population. According to them, the proportion of hospital admissions that are 'alcohol-related' has risen from 1.32% to 1.34% in five years, which does not sound quite like the 'epidemic' you may have read about.

Take hypertension, for example. There are many hundreds of thousands of admissions for hypertensive disease every year. The system of attributable fractions assumes that 28% of them are due to alcohol (13% for women), and, as a result, the number of 'alcohol-related' hypertension admissions has risen from 136,000 to 383,900 since 2002. There are also a huge number of admissions for heart palpitations, of which 182,300 are blamed on alcohol (up from 87,000 in 2002).

I am not necessarily saying that these ailments were not caused by alcohol in some way, but these two conditions make up more than half of the million admissions that have filled the headlines. And those headlines are invariably accompanied with images of young people out on a Saturday night. The unmistakeable impression is that a million people are being rushed to hospital with alcohol poisoning or liver cirrhosis. They're not. The admissions that are wholly attributable to alcohol make up less than a quarter of the total.

I suppose images of people in their eighties repeatedly being admitted to hospital with heart problems wouldn't sell the temperance lobby's agenda so effectively, but it is these pensioners, rather than the teen bingers, who are the real face of this moral panic. Hospital admissions for heart failure, hypertension, stroke, stomach cancer etc. will almost certainly continue to rise in the future because of the ageing population. As a consequence, the number of partially attributable alcohol-related hospital admissions will also rise. It has to, because although the number of admissions change, the underlying assumptions do not.

(It should be mentioned that drinking has prevented many thousands of hospital admissions because of the protective effect of alcohol on the heart. The NHS figures cannot be expected to include these, but any honest anti-alcohol campaigner would calculate how many admissions have been saved and debit it from the total.)

However, beneath all this noise, there is evidence of a rise in genuine alcohol-related diseases. The number of deaths from alcoholic liver disease—a diagnosis that is less prone to statistical fiddling—has risen from just over 3,000 to just over 4,000 in the last decade. This is much less dramatic than the temperance lobby likes to claim (and the rate fell last year) but it is a rise and it is compatible with falling consumption because overall consumption is a poor predictor of chronic alcoholism.

And chronic alcoholism is the issue. Along with those who commit alcohol-related violence, it is the chronic alcoholics who are the real problems. They need help and support while the thugs need punishment. The broad population-based policies of the temperance movement will not address either issue. They are going down the same dead-end of denormalisation that the tobacco control mob have gone down. They will punish the many for the sins of the few while doing nothing for the minority of people who abuse alcohol in a damaging way. Like the imbeciles of the anti-smoking lobby, they are obsessed with an imaginary war with the drinks industry which will do nothing to reduce harm or save lives. If these people were only idiots they would be tolerable, but they are dangerous idiots because their broad brush policies ignore the real problems.

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The paranoia of Alcohol Concern

Alcohol Concern has been using your tax money to produce a piss-poor report about how the evil drinks industry markets to kiddies on the internet.

Except they don't, really, and Alcohol Con can't produce any evidence to the contrary. Instead, they resort to saying that some drinks companies use Facebook and Twitter, and so do teenagers. Ipso facto, drinks companies must be banned from using Facebook and Twitter.

And yes, that is exactly what they're demanding:

Given their strong appeal to young people, official alcohol marketing should not be permitted on social networking sites.

The report is of the usual fake charity standard, containing shocking revelations like this:

Each of the most popular drinks brands amongst young people aged 11-17 in the UK, namely Fosters, WKD, Carling, Budweiser, Carlsberg, Bacardi and Smirnoff, have a dedicated website.

The monsters! The vile unfeeling monsters! And there is in-depth research like this:

Video websites such as YouTube have also meant that previously-aired alcohol television adverts, which may not satisfy today’s broadcasting codes, have gained a new lease of life; a search on YouTube of “Carling Black Label” and “Tetley’s Bitter” for example produces adverts for the brands from the 1980s and the early 1990s.

Look, this is the internet. On the internet you can find out how to make a bomb, you can discuss designer drugs, you can find more porn than you could watch in a life-time, you can download any movie, steal any song, write about anything and read about anything. It's unstoppable, uncontrollable and it is gloriously immune to censorship. If a fifteen year old wants to go onto Youtube and look at an old Carlsberg Black Label advert, that is the least of your worries.

None of this is evidence. It is banal Googling and it tells us nothing. To be fair, Alcohol Con has gone to the effort of assembling a focus group of 16 and 17 year olds to discuss the connection between alcohol and the internet. The results were unsurprising. They used Facebook to put up pictures of themselves on a night out and, as you might expect, some of these nights out involved drinking.

For the young people surveyed, alcohol consumption and Facebook usage were both intrinsic parts of their everyday lives. It is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that SNS users enjoyed documenting their own drinking experiences and reading about the drink-fuelled exploits of others.

Fair enough. They are slightly underage but no one is suggesting that young people should be banned from using Facebook in case they mention drinking. So how does the drinks industry and their insidious marketing come into this?

None of the respondents interviewed admitted to being aware of or visiting brand websites.

I see.

None of the young people consulted have previously accessed brand websites and were not inclined to do so in the future. Similarly, the majority of respondents did not visit alcohol brand sites on Facebook, and the minority who have come across such pages previously had devoted little time to them.

Right. And what about the alcohol industry's sneaky use of Facebook, which Alcohol Con's head honcho Don Shenker calls a "real danger"?

Just a very small minority of the young people consulted had seen alcohol companies advertising on Facebook, through pop-ups on the side of their homepage.

Wow, this is a real epidemic of stealth marketing, isn't it? And what about Youtube?

Just one respondent mentioned searching for ‘funny videos’ on YouTube and had watched official alcohol videos. He recalled having watched the ‘Good Call’ advert by Fosters and the Heineken ‘Walk-in-fridge’ advert, and commented that they were amusing.

None of these respondents, however, were aware of alcohol channels on YouTube.

By this time you may be thinking that Alcohol Concern's report—faithfully publicised by the Daily Mail and others—is, at best, a waste of time that proves the opposite of what they are saying in the press, but maybe the drinks companies have been using Twitter to attract underage customers? I've been looking through the Twitter archive of a number of drinks companies (most of them aren't even on it) and I haven't found a single tweet that could be considered even vaguely child-orientated.

But then I looked at Alcohol Concern's twitter feed and it seems that they have found an example of malevolent practice. On August 15, Smirnoff tweeted this:

To which Dong Shaker replied:

What?!? We are dealing with drooling obsessives here. People who see hidden meanings in everything. Paranoid people, in other words. Can we stop funding them now please?

Interestingly, when you search for "Alcohol Concern Facebook" on Google, the first site on the list is a group called 'Alcohol Concern: Bugger Off' which has a mission statement with which I can sympathise:

Just a little show of disdain towards those boring twats at alcohol concern who are railing against a pint of beer costing 99p in Wetherspoons.

Listen. I'm sorry that your dad or mum was a drinker. I'm sorry for whatever deeply egocentric reason you have for joining such a pointless group. I honestly feel for you. But whatever happened to you, it's not the fault of the rest of mankind. Get over it. Shit happens. It's a genetic failing of yours. Not my fault.

I like drinking.

A beer is a social glue. And at 99p, hard working people on lower wages might be able to enjoy a few more of a night. And Cheers!

Alcohol Concern. Go away. Shut up. Leave us alone. Stop ruining everything for people.

You dull twats.

Smirnoff has 17,629 followers while Alcohol Concern has 269 followers. Who exactly does this fake charity represent again?

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Panorama's half-hour temperance commercial

This week's Panorama programme (BBC) can only be described as a half-hour advertisement for Britain's temperance movement. Its big 'scoop'—repeated by most newspapers and then inserted into the News at Ten—was that "nearly half" of the representatives on the government's Alcohol Working Group are from the drinks industry. Since the rest were all anti-alcohol lobbyists, that seems like a pretty balanced panel to me, but apparently it's a scandal.

Panorama managed to ignore the irony of complaining about an imbalance in the government's policy group while making a programme that was as one-sided as the Battle of France. All the usual faces were there—Ian Gilmore, Don Shenker, Vivienne Nathanson—and all singing from the same hymn sheet they have been using for the last few years. They want a total ban on advertising, minimum pricing and restricted availability of alcohol (meaning, specifically, a ban on supermarkets selling alcohol). I think we all know that by now.

Did we see what ordinary drinkers thought of this? Did we see any academics who might be able to put British drinking habits in context? Of course not. Instead we got a brief clip of a representative from the drinks industry and a lot of footage of chronic alcoholics in a Liverpool hospital.

The policies put forward by the temperance lobby in this programme are not trivial. Alcohol advertising, though greatly restricted, has always been permitted in this country and no government has ever set a minimum price for alcohol or, as far as I am aware, any other product. Minimum pricing represents a major change in the way the state intervenes between buyer and supplier—"we can't let you buy it at that price, it's too cheap for you". This policy will cost nearly all drinkers a significant sum of money, it's probably illegal, there's no evidence that it will do any good and it's a Pandora's box that can never be closed.

Exceptional policies like these require exceptional circumstances and Panorama spent thirty minutes telling the viewer that Britain is indeed in crisis. Enormous quantities are being drunk at exceptionally low prices, they said, therefore prices need to rise. Something must be done.

Pretty much every assumption in this narrative is wrong. Whether judged by the standard of other countries or by the standard of previous eras, this country is not in the grip of an alcohol epidemic.

For instance, let's look at how the UK ranks amongst other EU states for alcohol consumption. (As always, click to enlarge).

As you can see, we are firmly mid-table, perched between Portugal and Cyprus. We are a very long way behind Luxembourg, the Czech Republic and Estonia. Incidentally, note that Finland is up near the top despite having some of the highest alcohol taxes in the world.

And speaking of alcohol taxes, is it true that drink is under-taxed in Britain?

Absolutely not. Of all the EU countries, we have the second highest rate of duty on beer and wine and the third highest duty on spirits. The countries that come above us are Ireland and Finland, both of whom are amongst the biggest drinkers in the EU.

This tells us two important things that deserve more attention:

(1) high alcohol taxes are not very effective in reducing alcohol consumption
(2) British drinkers are already taxed exorbitantly on the alcohol we consume.

But aren't we drinking much more than we used to? Well, up to a point. This is the graph used in the Independent's report on the Panorama 'story' today.

Firstly, notice how drinking rates have been in decline for several years and are currently only a squeak ahead of what they were in 1980 (when, contrary to claims made on Panorama, alcohol was 20% cheaper in real terms).

Secondly, note the year in which this graph starts. Can you think of any reason why people didn't drink much in 1947, when rationing was still in place and the country was virtually bankrupt? Anything at all? Because according to David "I am not a prohibitionist" Nutt, it's because the drinks industry wasn't as powerful then:

Since the second world war the alcohol industry has become one of the most powerful and successful in the UK. Intake has grown steadily, each person on average drinking more than twice that consumed in 1945.

Far be it from me to contradict Professor Nutt, but I'm pretty sure there was unrestricted alcohol advertising and no minimum pricing in 1947. If we take a longer view and start the clock from a more typical time in history, a rather different picture emerges.

It's a shame this graph doesn't go even further back as there was a large fall in consumption from 1876 onwards, but this chart is enough to show us that people drank quite a bit more at the start of the last century before falling massively during the First World War, rising a little, collapsing again during the Great Depression and falling to another low in the austerity years. Unless my eyes deceive me, 1947 represented the lowest rate of alcohol consumption in British peacetime history. I wonder why the Independent and Prof. Nutt would pick this particular era as the start point?

Since 1947, alcohol consumption has gradually returned to normal levels. It can truthfully be said to have doubled, but it would be more informative to say that its returning to the historical average. Anyone who tells you that we're in the midst of a drinking epidemic because we're drinking twice as much as we did during the age of austerity is trying to sell you something. Specifically, they are trying to sell you deeply illiberal temperance policies under the cover of a moral panic which does not exist.

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Drinking is the new smoking (part 94)

Those who were at Stony Stratford on Saturday will have heard Roger Helmer predicting that the day would come when those who ordered wine in restaurants would be given a bottle emblazoned with a picture of a diseased liver.

Pro-smoking hyperbole? Reductio ad absurdum? Not at all. Regular readers will know that such images have been considered in Thailand and that the plan is for 'graphic warnings' to go worldwide.

In Australia (where else?), the hapless drinks industry has decided to play ball with the neo-prohibitionists under the pathetic illusion that they are dealing with reasonable people. Consequently, they have agreed to place written health warnings on their cans and bottles.

Well, guess what? The wowsers still aren't happy...

The industry’s move to put messages on the labels of all alcohol products is theoretically the right move and one that we’ve been advocating for.

Indeed you have, indeed you have. You must be delighted.

“The labels introduced voluntarily by the industry do not go far enough,” Dr Hambleton [president of the Australian Medical Association] said.

Oh.

The Alcohol Policy Coalition recommends health messages that are outcome-related, that takes up 25 percent of the package surface and includes prominent text and graphic warnings.

Well, colour me flabbergasted. A bunch of temperance cranks demands the drinks industry put health bigger, graphic warnings on booze and when they foolishly oblige—and before the change has even been implemented—the cranks start crying that it's not enough. We've been here before, have we not?

And then, as Penn and Teller would say, there's this asshole...

Public Health Association of Australia spokesperson Professor Mike Daube said the push was little more than public relations rather than a meaningful public health promotion.

Does that name ring any bells? It should. Mike Daube was the president of ASH (UK) in the late 1970s when he put that organisation firmly on the path to prohibition. If drinkers have any doubt that they're on the same trajectory as smokers they might take note that they're not just faced with the same rhetoric, but with the same personnel.

But, hey, all these guys want is a graphic warning that covers 25% of the pack, just like cigarettes. After that they'll calm down and move onto something else, just like these anti-smoking campaigners did...

Larger packet warnings fail to satisfy anti-smoking lobby

Regulations requiring tobacco manufacturers to carry larger pictorial and written warnings on cigarette packets have failed to satisfy tobacco control groups.

Tobacco control groups failing to be satisfied?! Say it ain't so!

They say the graphic warning pictures of cancers and other diseases which can be caused by smoking do not go far enough to deter smokers.

This is completely out of character for these folks. Usually, they're so easy to please. Something must have really rattled them this time, so what gives?

Churit Tengtrisorn, director of the Public Health Ministry's Office of Tobacco Control Committee, has announced regulations requiring tobacco companies to increase the size of anti-smoking pictures to cover 60% of the pack, up from the current 55%.

And how right he is. With so many people thinking cigarettes are good for them, expanding the warning from 55% and 60% should make literally millions of people give up smoking. Thank God this man has brought this discrepancy to light. But perhaps we could do even more?

Bungon Ritthiphakdee, director of Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance, said Uruguay had succeeded in introducing warning pictures which made up 80% of the space on cigarette packs.

Well, there you go. Still, that's Southeast Asia. Nothing so silly could happen in Australia, the land the of fearless individualism, could it now?

In its release of draft plain packaging bill, Australian government also announced it would increase size of picture warnings to 75% of front and 90% of back of tobacco packs from 2012. Australia will then have overall world's largest pack health warnings, with average of 82.5% of front and back.

D'oh!

Drinkers, don't make me spell it out to you, this is getting embarrassing for both of us. Let me just say it again in two words.

You're next.

Oh, and they're banning swearing in Victoria. As Clive James once said, the problem with Australia isn't that we sent a load of prisoners there, but that we sent a load of prison wardens there. Poor buggers.

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Won't somebody please think of the old people?

I want to join the Pub Curmudgeon and Longrider in offering my scorn to the Royal College of Physicians Psychiatrists for this...

People over 65 should drink less, a report says

Recommended safe limits for drinking alcohol by older people should be drastically cut, according to a report.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists says people over 65 should drink a maximum of only 1.5 units of alcohol a day.

That is the equivalent of just over about half a pint of beer or a small glass of wine.

How softly we creep towards zero. It won't be long before there is 'no safe level' for anyone and the temperance lobby can really get to work.

It warns current advice - 14 units of alcohol for women and 21 for men each week - is based on work with young adults.

I believe this to be a lie. According to one who was there, the guidelines—now rebranded 'safe limits'—were "not based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee." If any evidence has appeared in the years since to make the guidelines anything other than an "intelligent guess", the RCP has not publicised it. I have never heard the claim that the limits were devised only with young adults in mind, and it's not as if they haven't had enough media coverage over the years to mention this little fact.

But even if you accept that the guidelines are not pure fantasy—in which case you may be drunk yourself—they were weekly guidelines, not daily 'safe limits'. A weekly guideline cannot be cut up into seven chunks and still carry the same risk. If you do that, you'll end up making preposterous statements like "drinking more than half a pint of a beer in a day puts old people's lives at risk." That is so plainly untrue that no old person is going to take the Royal of College of Physicians seriously. Welcome aboard, oldies.

The report says a third those who experience problems with alcohol abuse do so later on in life, often as a result of big changes like retirement, bereavement or feelings of boredom, loneliness and depression.

Well, you know what? If that's their situation, let them have a bloody drink, you miserable temperance swine. There is no public interest being served by having elderly people face loneliness and depression in a state of total sobriety. It really is—and I can't say this often enough—none of your business.

The editor of Saga magazine, Emma Soames, described the recommendations as "unbelievable".

"I think people will be infuriated by this. It's described as a public health problem, it's actually a private health matter."

Abso-fricking-lutely. It takes a descendent of Winston Churchill to tell it like it is. 'Public health' is a grossly misused term that is almost exclusively applied to private health. The infectious diseases have all but disappeared in Britain. Water and air is clean. Food is safe and labelled. At a time when we need a public health movement the least, the largest and much well-funded public health movement in history emerges.

There are, let's face it, only two things that are likely to cause poor health: bad luck and bad habits. You can't do anything about the first and the second is entirely a matter for the individual. Those who interfere in private behaviour do not deserve to be described as part of a public health movement. Call them anything you like—busybodies, wowsers, puritans, zealots, neo-prohibitionists—but don't go along with the charade that the private is public.

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