40p a unit alcohol 'not enough' says expert

Published on Sunday 6 June 2010 23:08

SCOTLAND has "drunk itself into a corner" and only measures to reduce the easy availability of alcohol will help resolve the country's serious health issues, a conference will hear tomorrow.

Ken Barrie, senior lecturer in alcohol and drug studies at the University of the West of Scotland, said consumption of alcohol had risen dramatically as prices dropped, leading to an increase in problems such as liver disease and violence.

The expert said worldwide evidence backed the effectiveness of methods such as setting a minimum price per unit – a measure proposed by the Scottish Government but rallied against by opposition parties.

Mr Barrie, who is a main speaker at the Alcohol in Scotland conference in Edinburgh tomorrow, said if efforts to reduce the availability of alcohol were dismissed, Scotland's alcohol crisis would continue. He said educational campaigns to encourage more moderate drinking were "almost useless".

Responding to critics of minimum pricing, he said: "I would suggest they consider the scientific evidence in terms of alcohol-related harm, physical harm, social harm and so on, and consider how they are going to get themselves out of this corner. We have drunk ourselves into a corner basically."

A minimum price of 40p per unit of alcohol has been suggested as the possible limit for Scotland, though the figure has not been confirmed. But Mr Barrie said evidence suggested the figure may have to be 45p or 50p before it started having a really significant effect.

"The evidence internationally would suggest that if minimum pricing was the way forward then it would be substantially more than the minimum suggested. You might want to think of 45p or 50p, and some people might suggest more."

Mr Barrie said the low cost of alcohol had led to an increase in problems linked to drinking in excess. "We are well into almost 50 years of alcohol consumption increasing steadily from one decade to the next," he said.

"That is reflected by cheaper alcohol, and also more available alcohol. In that sense alcohol is an ordinary commodity, where we would expect the cheaper it is the more people consume. That is exactly what is happening."

Mr Barrie said the space allocated to alcohol in shops should be scrutinised, along with its sale in places like fuel stations.

He said: "If you were to turn the clock back to 1980, there were people then concerned about alcohol consumption, but we drank a lot less than we do now. There was much less of it available in supermarkets, it was more difficult to get at."

"It strikes me that we have had something approaching deregulation on all sorts of things in the last 30 years, one of them has been alcohol, and we have seen increasingly the consequences from that."

Scottish Labour said increasing the price of alcohol would simply boost profits for the supermarkets. But Mr Barrie said: "If you increase the price of alcohol, you might reasonably expect if people are going to drink less, then the gross or overall profit alcohol producers make might just be much the same."

Increasing restrictions on availability were backed by doctors and health campaigners.

A spokeswoman for the British Medical Association in Scotland said: "There has been a vast increase in licences, predominantly for off-sales, so it is now possible to buy alcohol on every street corner. The further you have to travel to buy alcohol, the less likely it is to be bought on the spur of the moment."

Alcohol Focus Scotland chief executive Dr Evelyn Gillian said:

"Increasing price and reducing availability offer our best hope of reducing consumption."

However, David Pole, chief executive of the Portman Group, the industry body on responsible drinking, said the focus should be on education and law enforcement. He said: "If people are determined to misuse alcohol, they will get hold of it somehow. Making it more expensive and less easily available won't change their behaviour."