It’s time someone took a stand for the freedom to think and drink

IN economic good times, all the different good causes lobby for their share of the bounty.

In today’s straitened circumstances, their imperative is to fight cuts. One group, though, always has ideas to help the finance minister of the day make his sums add up. Public health campaigners have no end of sins they want to tax if they cannot ban, and the more that sin is indulged, the more tempted the Department of Finance becomes.

Public health campaigners on both sides of the Irish Sea, therefore, were quick to embrace the findings of a new study published in the medical journal, The Lancet, which claimed that alcohol is a more dangerous drug than both crack cocaine and heroin.

Presenting a new scale of drug harm that rates the damage to users themselves and to wider society, the scientists, led by the controversial Prof David Nutt, rated alcohol the most harmful drug overall, almost three times as harmful as cocaine or tobacco.

They assessed damage according to nine criteria on harm to the user and seven criteria on harm to others. Harms to the user included things such as drug-specific or drug-related death, damage to health, drug dependence and loss of relationships, while harms to others included crime, environmental damage, family conflict, international damage, economic cost and damage to community cohesion.

Drugs were then scored out of 100: the higher the score, the more dangerous the drug. Ecstasy is only one-eighth as harmful as alcohol, according to these scientists’ analysis. Drugs such as mephedrone and LSD came out as almost harmless, well below tobacco and even valium in the rankings.

Nutt, who not so long ago had to resign as the British government’s top adviser on drugs for his controversial views about cannabis, not surprisingly concludes that alcohol consumption has to be curbed further as part of a public health strategy.

This gives hope to Irish health campaigners who are trying to persuade the Government to adopt some, if not all, of the same measures being introduced in Scotland by the minority nationalist administration there. Tighter ID controls and clampdowns on cheap drinks promotions are one thing, however: minimum alcohol pricing is quite another. Just as Ireland led the way in terms of banning smoking in public places, the Scot Nats hope they will set a new trend.

Of course, minimum pricing is not actually an attack on alcohol itself. After all, plenty of health advisers and policy experts are partial to a Chenin Blanc themselves. No, the real problem is the people who are doing the boozing. This is less a case of ‘demon drink’ than ‘demon drinkers’.

The message of the booze-pricing debate is that, yes, ‘people like us’ can drink appropriately and responsibly – it is the great unwashed who cannot. Get smashed at a fancy dinner party, if you like: just don’t buy a crate of 48 cheap lagers and invite your mates over. The health lobby seems to have an instinctive cultural dislike of alcohol because it tends to be consumed in a social group and it makes us cocky, happy, arrogant, sexually charged and up for fun, unlike cups of tea – or cannabis.

At least governments employ an equal opportunities ban on narcotic drugs, legally denying everybody access to them, whereas a minimum price on alcohol would disproportionately impact on poor people who would be priced out of the market. That’s not just using science to moralise but to discriminate.

Not that the anti-boozing lobby will stop there. Speculation abounds that the national substance misuse strategy might advocate the ending of alcohol sponsorship in sport when it reports to the Government soon. As the chief executive of Alcohol Action Ireland (AAI), put it recently: “Research has established that alcohol advertising increases the likelihood that young people will start drinking earlier, and those who are already drinking will drink more.”

But what research is this? All the research? Most of it? A couple of studies? AAI is also keen to promote its finding that 30% of 16 and 17-year-olds in Ireland have viewed an alcohol advertisement online. Well, blow me down. Presumably rather more have watched hardcore pornography online. Some will even have enjoyed it…

The long-held contention – a veritable article of faith – is that alcohol advertising has a strong impact on levels of consumption. Not only that, the more alcohol is drunk overall, the more problem drinkers are created, the only difference between heavy drinkers and the rest of the population being the actual amount of alcohol consumed.

According to the public health establishment’s view, increases in average alcohol consumption increase the number of problem drinkers and thus the amount of alcohol-related harm. Moreover, alcohol advertising both initiates new consumers and increases total consumption.

Even in its milder forms, the argument goes that exposure to advertising causes individuals to drink who might not otherwise do so and causes people to consume more alcohol than they otherwise would.

But where is the evidence? Study after study concludes that only, possibly, in the case of beer does advertising increase consumption and, even then, only very marginally. Indeed, as in the case of Prohibition in the US, there is still very strong evidence that the imposition of bans does not reduce consumption.

Does this mean that advertising is ineffective? Far from it. But the effect is to cause drinkers to switch brands and move between beer and wine and spirits, not drink more overall.

What about warning labels on alcohol? If cigarette packets have them, why not bottles of liquor?

Here, of course, the public health lobby assumes we are all stupid. Do pregnant women not know that hitting the bottle is a bad idea? Of course they do (although the filthy looks pregnant women receive these days from other women for so much as sipping half a glass of wine amount to a kind of female fascism).

ANTI-ALCOHOL advertising doesn’t work very well because at-risk drinkers filter it out and convince themselves the warnings aren’t aimed at them.

Furthermore, many problem drinkers – by which I don’t mean people who enjoy a few drinks a couple of nights a week – cognitively resist attempts by ‘Big Brother’ to shape their behaviour. On the contrary, highlighting alcohol’s risks only makes it more attractive to some people.

The authorities might claim new restrictions are needed on medical grounds. In fact, the driving force behind such attempts to ‘save people from themselves’ is not medicine, but moralism. Such is the illiberal climate that to suggest people should be free to make their own decisions about what to drink when is to invite accusations not only that you are irresponsible, but possible insane.

Once upon a time, those who opposed prohibition and other punitive anti-drinking measures did so not because they believed drunkenness to be a good thing, but because they saw state encroachments on people’s liberties as a greater evil than the demon drink.

Yet today the consensus is that a ‘civilised society’ must not permit its citizens to make their own choices – including the ‘wrong’ ones – about what they drink or how they behave. It is time someone made a stand for the freedom to think and drink for ourselves.