'Does anyone in your family smoke?

Do they need help quitting?" It was Sunday morning and dear old nanny state was on the line, just checking up on our health and wellbeing. She introduced herself as Dr Wilson from the local NHS clinic and I told her where to go, or would have done if my wife hadn't got to the phone first.

Where will this obsession to save us from ourselves end? Well, sadly not just with cigarettes, as the former chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, made clear in an interview in 2007. Under the headline "Fat binge drinkers beware" he told readers that "tobacco is a good example of a health problem that is in hand, but when we turn to obesity and alcohol misuse, those are not yet anywhere under control". Note the word "control".

The campaign against tobacco is worth revisiting because it is now being replayed against alcohol almost word for word. Despite the efforts of the anti-smoking lobby led by ASH (Action On Smoking And Health), a sizeable minority refused to quit. As consenting adults indulging in a perfectly legal product, the debate stalled until someone came up with the brilliant wheeze of "passive smoking". This changed everything. Suddenly smokers were not just killing themselves, they were killing everyone around them.

ASH was formed in 1971 by the Royal College Of Physicians which also set up AHA (the Alcohol Health Alliance) five years ago. This coalition of medical bodies and anti-alcohol pressure groups has been busy highlighting the dangers of "passive drinking". Literally speaking, it sounds absurd: as though you can get drunk from simply inhaling the fumes of a pint of beer, but that is not quite what they mean.

"The 'passive effects' of alcohol misuse are catastrophic," says AHA's website. "Rape, sexual assault, domestic and other violence, drunk driving and street disorder – alcohol affects thousands more innocent victims than passive smoking." And who could argue with that? Nobody has ever been convicted of driving under the influence of Benson & Hedges, or even Silk Cut.

The likes of ASH have never advocated an outright ban on smoking, possibly because they don't want to find themselves out of a job, but mainly because prohibition does not work. When it was tried with alcohol in the United States in the 1920s, it was an unmitigated disaster. As a result, today's pressure groups prefer to chip away, bringing in one small restriction after another.

I believe anyone who likes a drink will soon face the same relentless prodding and pushing as smokers have endured. The British Medical Association is already arguing for pictures of diseased organs to be splashed across bottles of booze, just like those gruesome images on cigarette packets. Why? Because we are apparently in the grip of a terrible epidemic, even though consumption has been falling steadily for almost 10 years.

Is "Binge Britain out of control", as the headlines keep telling us, or is it a moral panic whipped up by The Daily Mail? One thing's for sure. Within five years Dr Wilson will be back on the phone: "Does anyone in your family drink alcohol? Do they need help cutting down?" n