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Tough measures to tackle drink-related crime, antisocial behaviour and illness – including a politically controversial minimum price for alcohol – will be recommended by government advisers this week.
The message to ministers from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) will reopen the debate on alcohol policy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/30/health-advisers-alcohol-minimum-price
Minimum pricing is illegal under EU rules. EU law trumps UK law.
This is thus illegal.
A group of experts convened by the organisation – its programme development group – has spent almost two years studying how best to reduce alcohol-related disorders, which between them cost an estimated £27bn a year.
That figure covers the cost of healthcare, crime, disorder and lack of productivity attributable to alcohol, including the £2.7n the NHS spends treating the chronic and acute effects of drinking.
The direct costs are more than offset by the £8.4 billion HMRC gets in booze duty.
The indirect costs have to be offset by the joy and glory that people get from consuming alcohol. Estimating this is not simple but we can indeed put a lower bound to it. As people voluntarily hand over their cash for the buzz from having drunk the alcohol, this joy and glory must be worth at least what is paid for the alcohol which produces the joy and glory. That’s somewhere north of £50 billion a year.
The benefits are therefore larger than the costs: we do not have a problem here.
Action is needed because one in four people drink dangerously high levels of alcohol that can damage physical and mental health, Nice believes.
That level which does start do do damage….well, let’s define damage actually. If you drink no alcohol then there is some level of nastiness that can happen to you. As you start to imbibe, those nastinesses decrease. We only get back up to teetotal levels of nastiness in the 50-60 units a week range.
No, NICE is not stating that 25% of the population drink at those levels. They are using some other numbers which were randomly pulled out of someone’s a*se a couple of decades back.
So, they’re lying, we don’t actually have a problem and their proposed solution is illegal.
Didn’t we just change governments so that we didn’t have to deal with this sort of thing any more?
Indeed. All these initiatives constitute an assault on the culture of the British people. I would encourage anyone with an hour to spare to watch The Seven Sins of England in order that they might gain some perspective.
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