Binge drinking: that’s Asda Price

Writing an article arguing for increased alcohol taxation – making it more expensive at supermarkets – is going to be a hard sell in a student newspaper. There is preaching to the choir and then there is preaching to the Richard Dawkins Foundation; here goes.

You can get yourself totally smashed with just £3.98 on a bottle of vodka from Asda (I didn’t get paid to write that). At supermarkets price is no barrier to drunkenness, as I am sure you all know. Students like to get ‘pre-lashed’ at halls or at home and then go clubbing, where drinks are far more expensive and under far more control.

The government, against the advice of Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson, claims that it does not want to increase taxes on alcohol because the majority should not have to suffer high costs of alcohol for the abuse of a small minority. However, the social costs of providing cheap alcohol to this minority are being paid for by the majority, in the increased violent crime (forty-five percent of violent incidents are alcohol related) and rape, (one in three cases involve women who were drunk); domestic violence (thirty-two percent of domestic violence happens with perpetrator under the influence of alcohol); the health costs suffered by citizens and dealt with by the NHS (£2.7billion). This is what Liam Donaldson calls ‘passive drinking’: the costs inflicted on third parties in excessive alcohol consumption.

Under the pressure of regulation and tax, pubs are being forced out of business at a rate of thirty-nine pubs per week in Britain in 2009. This is while supermarkets continue to offer cheap alcohol, often twenty-four hours a day. The status quo is the total reverse of an effective policy on binge drinking. If you buy a drink in a pub the bar staff are legally required to cease serving you if you seem too drunk. When you have bought your crate of eighteen cans of Stella for ten pounds from Tesco the staff can’t say, “Well you can have it, but only if you have no more than five for this evening, deal?” In other words there are no controls on people being irresponsible.

Pubs are places where people should be encouraged to drink, not simply due to the legal rules preventing excessive drinking. People are encouraged to be sociable in pubs; talk to each other rather than just drink. Indeed, these are unwritten social rules which, though weaker in the UK compared to the Mediterranean, remain. People are just less likely to want to get sick on each other in a social, public environment.

Using public advertising campaigns has been shown to be ineffective. What is needed is a good dose of nanny state paternalism to stop binge drinking on the grounds that people are not exercising their freedom rationally; they are not paying the real social costs of that vodka from Asda.

My solution is to tax alcohol in supermarkets, to make it more expensive than drinking in pubs, thereby creating an incentive to drink where social rules and enforced legal rules should be used to prevent drunkenness. Consumers in pubs would be discouraged from engaging in heavy drinking and especially binge drinking, whilst in the long term this policy would be carrying out social engineering to counter Britain’s binge drinking culture. Nanny state to the rescue.