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.