How alcohol has slipped past the health regulators

IT COSTS the Scottish economy an estimated £1 billion a year. It is responsible for one in five road accidents. It is a factor in half of all fire deaths. It plays a part in one-third of all domestic violence incidents and is a contributory element in up to 40 per cent of suicides. Yet alcohol - a substance potentially every bit as lethal as tobacco and considerably more harmful than a hamburger - has largely escaped the wrath of the secretary of state for health.

While tobacco companies and fast food manufacturers face statutory restrictions in this week’s government white paper on health, Big Alcohol - as the drinks manufacturers are collectively known - will be raising a glass to the fact that it has so far escaped the same level of scrutiny.

Not only is alcohol not facing the same restrictions as other "legal vices", every step the government has taken over the last 30 years has been to make drink more accessible.

The number of licensed premises has increased; licensing laws have been relaxed; discounting has become routine; duty on alcohol has be frozen in repeated budgets; the strength of wines and beers has greatly increased; and pubs have been free to introduce "happy hours" as and when they please.

The result is that the price of alcohol has fallen in real terms to such an extent that it is now 50 per cent cheaper than it was in 1978. These days, if your palate is not too discerning, you can get rip-roaringly drunk on a few quid.

Whether you applaud or abhor the government’s decision to crack down on obesity and on smoking in public places, the fact that Big Alcohol has been left to police itself is intriguing. While the white paper mentions alcohol abuse, the government restricts itself to working with the Portman Group, the drinks industry’s self-regulatory body, to cut down on binge drinking. Any initiatives undertaken will be entirely voluntary.

But the wider social ills associated with alcohol abuse - and the Scottish Executive says that one in four of us is drinking hazardously - go far beyond anything chocoholics or nicotine addicts inflict. Nobody has gone on a crime spree fuelled by tobacco or chips, but alcohol is a consistent factor in violent and not so violent crime.

The 1 billion cost of alcohol abuse is more than enough to give every obese person in Scotland their own personal trainer on the NHS. A survey commissioned by the Executive puts the cost of excessive drinking to the NHS at 96 million a year, to the criminal justice system at 267.9 million a year and to social services at 85.9 million a year. Absenteeism due to drink costs 404.5 million a year and the cost of premature death is put at 216.7 million a year.

Despite this, biscuits and sweets now seem to have been deemed a greater social evil than super-strength lager or cheap vodka. The industry has been able to argue that, while obesity levels have risen dramatically over the last 20 years, government statistics show that alcohol consumption has remained stable. (These figures are contested by many in the medical profession and deaths from alcoholic liver disease in Scotland have almost tripled in a decade.) Yet even if the figures are correct, there is no getting away from the fact that we had a problem 20 years ago. The statistics suggest that it all went wrong with the Cinzano generation in the 1970s. Alcohol abuse has now become so culturally acceptable - we boast about our hangovers to our colleagues on a Monday morning - that as a society we have become inured to the consequences.

Then there is the clout of the industry. Big Alcohol is one of the slickest and most effective lobbyists in Britain. The drinks and hospitality industry employs 200,000 people and spends more than 200 million a year on advertising. The government collected 7.3 billion in revenue from alcohol sales in 2003.

On an international level, the World Health Organisation has failed to take on the drinks industry because it fears it might compromise its work in reducing tobacco consumption. It worries that if it opened up a second front, the tobacco and the drinks companies would form a joint opposition.

But perhaps Big Alcohol’s smartest move was the establishment of the Portman Group in 1989. Many in the medical profession doubt the effectiveness of self-regulation when the number of under-age drinkers has increased dramatically in the last 20 years. But while the government is hell-bent on policing the nation’s fridges, its preferred method of overseeing the nation’s drinks cabinet is to open up a dialogue with the manufacturers and allow them to police itself.

Ultimately, the biggest stumbling block to tackling alcohol abuse is perhaps the fact that so many of us enjoy a drink. While less than 30 per cent of us smoke and only 20 per cent of us are obese, more than 90 per cent of us - in other words, 40 million British adults - drink.

When it comes to vices, it’s funny how other people’s always seem so much more anti-social than our own.