I’m pleased to learn that my esteemed friend Neil Gray, Scotland’s Heath Minister, is getting to grips with the nation’s alcohol problems.
Mr Gray has commissioned experts to study the impact of banning alcohol-branded pint glasses, umbrellas and T-shirts in a bid to reduce booze-related deaths.
His bold initiative came after the National Records of Scotland revealed that alcohol caused 1,277 deaths in Scotland in 2023, the highest number since 2008.
From which, of course we can deduce that the government’s much heralded minimum unit pricing (MUP) policy has been the unmitigated failure that many who have lived experience of alcohol addiction (the real experts) predicted it would be.
Now, I must point out right here and right now that I’m no expert in the field of alcohol addiction studies.
However, I’ll stick my neck out on this one: banning the vivid red logo of J&R Tennent or Mr Arthur Guinness from appearing on assorted marketing items will reduce alcohol deaths not a single jot.
Alcohol and drug addiction is acutely most prevalent in those communities blighted by economic and health inequality.
The dripping roast which is Scotland’s swollen, state-funded addiction sector is dominated by actors drawing down enormous salaries and tasked by telling their government paymasters what they want to hear.
Sadly, neither these people, nor their favoured media commentators, know little of the daily spiritual, emotional and physical challenges that many in our poorest neighbourhoods are facing.
If they did, they’d know that making supermarket booze a little more expensive and removing logos from merchandise insults the intelligence of victims and their families, and trivialises their everyday existence.
For many who suffer the consequences of free market-led inequality it’s not the actual alcohol that’s attractive, it’s the state of oblivion that comes with it. As one addiction experienced expert told me last year, people will always turn to the cheapest methods of oblivion if last week’s potion of choice suddenly becomes more expensive. They will always find a replacement.
Effectively, the politicians and their chi-chi policies betray scant understanding of the inadvertent consequences of decades of policies (and non-policies) which make people turn to cheaper alternative routes (of which there are many) to oblivion.
It’s the mind-altered state they’re looking for and they’re doing so because they’re in pain.
Gray areas
If Mr Gray and the bodies he’ll extravagantly reward for looking at T-shirts and umbrellas really insist on pursuing this route I can help them out with some ideas of my own.
I’d be in favour of looking at our entire pub culture. Why stop at banning logos on glassware and clothing accessories? Publicans should be ordered to disguise the true nature of their businesses too.
These wretched purveyors of alcohol should be made to remove any indication that their premises sell the demon drink. Instead, they could be encouraged to decorate their shop fronts with pictures of shiny happy people enjoying glasses of lemonade and playing rounders on a village green.
Of course, the fact that many award-winning film and television dramas include scenes shot inside licensed premises presents its own challenges. Often – as happens in real life – bad things like eviscerations and beheadings occur when people are howling with it.
Surely, given the technological expertise we now have, the big studios can call in those old dramas and reimagine them using the tools of artificial intelligence. Pub scenes could be reconfigured into bright and sparkly artisan coffee shops.
Instead of always hammering the whisky in Edinburgh’s Oxford Bar, Detective Inspector John Rebus could be filmed getting rattled with too many Nicaraguan Arabica espressos in yon Harvey Nicks.
Glass act
INDEED, Scotland’s entire arts and culture sector could be given grants pour encourager the “No Swally” rule in their creative outputs. This would actually address another problem I have with modern Scottish television drama.
In far too many of these productions, the action takes place in dark, rain-soaked locations in run-down areas. Invariably, the anti-hero is a booze-addled human husk seeking redemption from the hellish existence his bad life choices have caused.
Surely, if we’re banning logos from umbrellas and outdoor leisurewear we can encourage scriptwriters and dramatists to consider other settings for their edgy screenplays. The English are brilliant at doing this and they don’t seem to have patterns of problem drinking as intense as ours.
That’s because they can create dramas like Midsomer Murders and Father Brown where the main protagonists need a lie down after half a glass of cider.
And have you ever seen Doctor Who getting hammered and then trying to drive his Tardis under the influence? Yet the eccentric time traveller still manages to get into all sorts of intergalactic square gos without the assistance of too many salvadors.
Poor spirits
AND just to show that we’re all in this together, surely we could lead by example by rebranding our Scotch whisky exports. It’s no use getting local taverns to serve drinks in pink plastic beakers if we’re sending our Highland firewater to all corners of the globe and encouraging others to get blootered.
Surely we could enjoin the Scotch Whisky Association to agree to soften its labelling so that none of it actually mentions the word “whisky”.
And could we not, you know, have the labels showing nice rural scenes of healthy-looking youths having picnics in our Highlands as farmyard animals gambol cheerily in the background?
I’m also inclined to get The Herald’s intrepid investigative journalist Martin Williams to fire off a wee FOI to the Scottish Government to ask how much the annual booze bill is for all official functions in Holyrood, Bute House, and all local government buildings.
If we’re being serious about this then it has to start at the top.
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