Booze glorious booze

As you may have guessed from the fact that I'm a northerner, I am pretty fond of beer. That isn't really a surprising thing as most of the country is, but I figured I'd lay that fact down anyway for what I'm about to ramble about today.

So every now and then we get newspapers publishing stories about new figures or concern in the NHS over the amount of drink-related health problems there are in the UK. The latest one I've seen being about the number of drink-related hospital cases reaching 1 million a year. This has almost doubled since 2002/3, where there were 510,800 reported cases. Every time an article like this appears they say that they need to look at their approach to alcohol in the UK, but every time the approach stays the same. Increase taxes on alcohol, do nothing else. All this does is make people just as drunk, but slightly poorer. I can't remember a night out when I've thought "oh I shouldn't buy another pint, it's too expensive" after I've already have six or seven, it's a case of cash machine, more booze, win at life.

A night of moderate drinking at university

The only thing raising tax on sale of alcohol does is increase the stranglehold on alcohol from supermarkets and further destroy the pub trade. Since 1981 pubs have been on the raw end of every policy implemented by governments, leading to over 16,500 pub closures over the past 30 years. Due to the number of pub closures, the amount of tax actually generated from the tax hike is massively reduced. Data from The Guardian suggests that in 2010 the government lost over £254 million in taxes, and this can only have increased over the past year.

So the current policy leads to there STILL being an increase in medical alcohol-related cases and leads to lesser tax income than simply having a lower tax but more pubs open. The reasoning behind why there are more alcohol related cases is quite simple. The people who pay attention to the NHS propaganda about alcohol effects and the people who pay attention to tax and price increases are sensible people. Sensible people aren't the ones at risk from alcohol anyway, so you end up with a higher concentration of lunatic pissheads like myself still drinking and less sensible people out on a friday night. As such you get more people telling each other to drink more and think less around on a night out, and less people encouraging you to have a glass of water or to go home early. On the plus side, this means you have less whining fairies out on a night making everything dull. On the down side, everything is more expensive and you have a higher risk of waking up with a drip in your arm or a whale in your bed.

So what can be done to stop the high cost to the NHS that all us alchies going into hospital is causing? Obviously higher and higher taxes aren't doing anything. While the future plan to ban the sale of alcohol at lower than tax value will be a start of helping to ease the problem of supermarkets, I honestly don't think a real difference will be felt until the government taxes open alcohol, as served in restaurants and pubs, as separate from contained alcohol, such as when you buy a crate or cans from a shop. This would then allow them to tax each at separate rates, giving a lower tax grade to open alcohol which is served in a controlled environment. This would then allow them to put a higher level of responsibility on landlords to ensure customers are behaving properly and not getting too drunk because the landlords will be able to afford to stay open if they throw out a few customers who are acting stupidly.

These changes may have a helpful effect, though I am not sure how successful they would really be, as the main issue is cultural. We just enjoy getting drunk and binge drinking a lot. Whereas a French family may sit down for a meal over a few hours and enjoy a bottle of wine or two between them, we prefer going out with friends on a friday night and getting absolutely trollied. Nobody thinks this is anything other than terribly bad for their health. I think if you did a survey of people out on a night enjoying themselves, no matter how drunk they were if you asked them if drinking was good for their health they would say no. The obligatory take-away at the end of the evening is never helpful either. So a campaign from the NHS about the health issues related to drinking isn't going to be news to anyone, and as such won't change any attitudes or behaviours towards drinking. In fact, from my experience of people reading drinking information pamphlets, all they use it for is working out how to drink more effectively, and how to stay under the driving limit while having more than one pint.

Douchey, Pukey, Slutty and Bellend: the dwarfs
the other seven don't talk about

The problem I feel with the approach previous governments and the NHS have taken to drinking is that they seem to take away self-responsibility. By preaching to people about how it's bad to drink too much and raising taxes to try make people drink less you create a rebellion feeling in many which comes from feeling people are trying to control what you do. The approach needs to be more based on the responsibility of the individual to themselves and to their friends, and should encourage people to act instead of telling people off. Being 'punished' by the government with higher taxes simply makes people feel like teenagers at school, and brings out the desire to rock the boat and smash the system. Cultural changes don't come about through changes in law, they come about through changes in lifestyle and the way people think. Neither of which are done well through taxation.

If the government truly want to save money for the NHS from the result of too much drinking there is a quite simple solution, even if it is slightly draconian. Remove the rights to treatment on the NHS for illnesses and problems caused by excessive drinking. The problem of this of course comes within the homeless community, where alcoholism is rife and they don't have the money to afford support. This could be worked around in the same way that student loans are, in that a debt is placed which if you can pay, you pay. If you can't afford to pay, the debt would remain until you could, or until a lengthy amount of time has passed. The same system could be used for drug misuse and tobacco.

 However, this does have the rather large issue of being incredibly old-fashioned and overly strict. It would be a band-aid solution aimed at reducing costs rather than a long-term solution at reducing drinking in the country. However I, for one, would hate it if the children of tomorrow were taught that moderation is key and they should be sensible. 80% of teenagers would never get laid if it wasn't for the effects of alcohol, and the massive wave of depression amongst youngsters that would cause would be palpable. Not to mention, once I'm a pervy old man looking to find some younger women, it would be terrible if they all refused my offers for drinks because they had already had one vodka lemonade and that was enough for them thank you very much.

The Perfect Woman

It might cost the NHS a lot, and it might be the single biggest issue remaining in our society, but we all have to go one way or another don't we? I'd rather spend my time drunk and loving it until I die of acute liver failure than have a long healthy life with nothing to do on a night except watch terrible television and play endless games of scrabble. Give me the ale and an early grave any day.