When the Scottish Government launched its policy on minimum pricing for alcohol, the aims were clear. Alex Salmond said it would tackle the scourge of alcoholism on Scottish society and families. Nicola Sturgeon said it would reduce the significant harm of strong, low-cost alcohol. So that was the intention: to get at the worst effects of drink and fix them.
So how are we doing? For a while, it looked pretty positive. Shortly after the policy was introduced in 2018, alcohol sales fell to their lowest since the mid-90s. In 2019, there was also a fall in the number of deaths caused by alcohol. But – exacerbated by the pandemic no doubt – the most recent figures are grim. The total consumption of alcohol has dropped again recently, but deaths by alcohol are the highest they’ve been since 2008.
The reasons for this go pretty deep and have been exposed by a report on the minimum pricing policy by Public Health Scotland. Its conclusion is that the policy has failed to encourage or coerce problem drinkers to consume less – in fact, what they’re doing is they’re cutting back on food or heating so they can keep drinking at the higher prices. In other words, even though there have been some drops in total consumption, the policy hasn’t met its stated aims.
This is pretty shocking stuff because it exposes, first, a misunderstanding of the problem it seeks to fix and, second, a misunderstanding of the potential solutions. I’ve had alcoholics in my life and over the years I’ve interviewed people struggling with the problem. I remember one man telling me how he would drink himself to paralysis every day. If he didn't throw up in the night, he said, it wasn't a successful day and at his worst he was getting through a litre of vodka before lunchtime.
This, in the end, is the actual problem we’re dealing with here – at its worst, it can seem like nothing will stop an alcoholic drinking: not money, not the health consequences, not the effect on other people, nothing. But it’s also made much worse by poverty. Deaths from alcohol in the most deprived areas are four times more than in the least deprived which means minimum pricing is having the perverse effect of making some people’s situation even worse by forcing them to cut back on heating and food.
I think we can assume this was not the outcome the government was hoping for, but that may not be the end of it – in fact, we can be justifiably worried that ministers, not known for admitting when they’re wrong, will dig in anyway and apply the policy harder by increasing the price even more. Indeed, there are campaigners who are already calling for this to happen.
Should they do this, it’s likely to make life harder for the poorest while also failing to help the hardest drinkers. To make matters worse, when people do seek help, it’s hard or impossible to get. Phones ring out. Messages are not returned. And if they do finally get through, the options are limited or non-existent. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend Darren McGarvey’s recent series on addiction in which he visited an NHS residential rehab centre in Dumfries. It’s the only one of its kind in Scotland. The only one.
The obvious conclusion is we’ve got our approach to alcohol back to front and are applying the pressure in the wrong place. People struggling with poverty or with life or with alcohol or all three will not cut back on their drinking because of the cost – they’ll cut back on other things. But if they can be reached and given the treatment that’s appropriate for them, there is hope and that’s where we should be spending our money.
Someone who’s been very good on this is the Conservative MSP Annie Wells, who has proposed a Right to Recovery Bill so people can immediately access the drug or alcohol addiction treatment they need. Obviously, that would cost a heap of money but how much less than the millions the NHS, and social care, and the court system, and the police spend on dealing with the consequences of a problem un-tackled, a problem neglected?
The alternative, I’m afraid, is to carry on as we are with a public policy that – not for the first time – leaves poorer people paying disproportionately more than wealthier ones. It depresses me that a policy that’s aimed at fixing a problem is making it worse. But we must at least be hopeful that the government will listen to the evidence. Minimum pricing hasn’t worked. So stop it.
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