Alcohol pricing experiment saved 150 lives a year, Public Health Scotland study claims
Experts divided on conclusivity of figures, which showed 13.4 per cent fewer deaths from alcohol consumption
Lions with lasers for these people. Taking our money to then lie to us? Lions at least.
As ever, the place for the truth on this is Chris Snowdon.
TL:DR, it’s bollocks.
It’s the SNP. Every word they utter is a lie.
Has anyone looked at the rate of drugs related deaths in the same period? I’ll wager some have chosen a different poison.
Darrell Huff – How to lie with statistics, 1954.
And look at it this way:
Cigarette duty £11Bn.
Alcohol duty £12.7Bn.
Cost to NHS of alcohol related disease £3.5Bn.
Cost to NHS of smoking related diease £2.5Bn.
So, we save £6Bn by banning the naughty things but lose £16Bn in taxes and have to fork out pensions for longer.
They are projecting a rise in alcohol-related deaths during lockdown at the same %age as that in England and saying “they rose but less than that so we must thank MUP”. Covid-related deaths were higher in Scotland: was that due to MUP?
I expect MUP to have marginally reduced alcohol-related deaths as MUP should have reduced the amount of alcohol poor people can buy (and it is only in the poor areas where it has had an impact) and those who switch from buying food to buying alcohol will die of starvation or malnutrition-related causes instead.
There must have been some reduction in alcohol-related deaths in Scotland due to covid-19 killing off the most vulnerable nd the higher covid death rate in Scotland means that this was more significant in Scotland than England. The BBC report indicates that they ignored this, so the finding of a reduction is very probably correct but the size of thereduction is significantly overstated.
Why would anyone expect anything other than lies from the Scotch National Socialists? I’m still utterly bewildered by the porridge wogs continuing to vote for them.
So Dr Arse Wyper is convinced that when there are reductions in disease it’s defo due to MUP, but when there’s increase in acute harms, it’s less certain. I call bollocks on this.
Public Health bureaucrats lie. They lie for a living. They lie for money, fame, and power. They are lying liars.
And, all too often, they prove to be killers.
“The Scottish parliament must vote before May 1 next year on whether or not MUP will continue.”
Ah, there it is… at the bottom..
We now have Science™ on our side to push this through!!! See this number?!! It is lower!! And signed off by a Scientist™!!
*Actually finds the Lancet article, and has a look-see.*
Ah.. the scientific use of the word “significant” versus the use by Journalists and Politicians.
Also:
Sponsored Science™. The fact that it’s free-to-read in the bloody Lancet means its publication is paid for…
But honestly.. I invite peeps who are into stocks and economy here to have a look through this. There’s actually no medical jargon in there, it’s very carefully curated to be used at Politicians.
Treat the graphs as stock prices, and the tables as projected results and see whether you’d bet your money on that..
150, not 149, not 151 – per year…
No not lives saved, but terminal cases who might have lived a bit longer – weeks/months – without so much falling-down-water.
They keep doing this. Healthy people do not have their lives saved by a bit less booze, or breathing a bit less diesel fumes.
Like all those lives ‘saved’ by mRNA snake oil – not saved at all; at best able to live a few weeks/months longer (often with poor quality of life) to be killed by something else like cardiovascular disease, stroke, pneumonia, old age, etc as is normal for people over age 80.
As one of my old warehousemen said to me:
‘I know they’re lying… their lips are moving’
@ Grikath
Thanks. Being “The Lancet” it’s more believable than something from gov.scot. And it has noticed the increase in death/illness due to malnutrition among those addicted to alcohol and MUP.
One point that is ignored in the discussion is that the death rate drops initially and then increases again *at a slightly fster rate than that in England*. One should expect the difference in death rates to be initially tiny and progressively increasing if MUP worked as claimed.
@John77 There shouldn’t be any difference at all… At least when it comes to the specifically mentioned Liver diseases caused by long-term alcohol abuse.
Getting that takes years of… dedicated effort. Dying of it decades… The sample period is too short compared to the pathology..
And I’m missing the sharp uptick in liver related diseases, which you would expect.
Seen plenty of alcoholics in the shelters either (attempt to) quit or switch to binge-drinking, and the first thing that happens is their livers playing up like hell because the routine of abuse drops sharply.
With the binge-drinkers getting much closer to that alcohol-poisoning level much more often.
At least the latter explains the uptick in acute cases, but there should also be an uptick in the chronic cases. The pathology basically demands it…
And honestly… Lancet articles that are not behind their pay-wall that aren’t mandated, like CoVid?
Sponsored Science™ , pay-to-publish to get that “reputable” smell.
@ Grikath
Damage caused by excess of alcohol (or fat or sugar or …) tends to be cumulative so a change in consumption will have an effect that gradually increases over time. Starting with 10,000 heavy drinkers, one should expect a number to have life expectancies measured in days, a number with it measured in months and a number with it measured in years. A cut in consumption will reduce the number of imminent deaths by enough to count on your thumbs, those otherwise dying within months will have a greater benefit and some will die of causes “not wholly due to alcohol”. The longer they survive while drinking a lower quantity the more likely they are to live longer and/or die of other causes. So the differential between Scottish and English death rates solely due to alcohol should gradually and progressively decrease – it should *not* start to increase again after an initial drop – *unless* MUP is *not* working as predicted.
John77, you are right, indeed, if that MUP would indeed cause chronic alcoholics to drink less consistently, and not change their drinking pattern.
Thing is, and the increase in acute cases supports this, that it changed overall drinking behaviour from chronic “functional alcoholic” towards binge drinking. Also known as “junkie behaviour”.
You need your fix, and you will get it, hard, until you run out of money and scrape for food. Next check comes in.. Hit the stuff hard, until… etc.
Very heavily researched.
Also heavily researched: An organism can adapt to, and mitigate damage from, any biological stressor to significant degrees as long as exposure to that stressor is constant.
When that exposure becomes intermittent for the same levels of stress, the organism will incur an inceased rate in damage, up to toxic shock, as the adaptation declines to the average of the exposure.
Which is, in my opinion of course, what we see happen here:
The MUP does indeed bring the average amount of alcohol consumption in (heavy) alcoholics down, because it makes alcohol more expensive.
Which causes that initial decrease in cases/mortality.
However, the well-sauced Scots in this little experiment didn’t start drinking less consistently. They moved over to binge drinking, like any addict.
And as their built-up tolerance slowly declined, but their consumption per session did not, they hit the Poison Territory.
Which is the point where you start seeing the increased acute cases, and the rising mortality rate.
Seriously… There’s decades of research on the effect, and they completely ignored it..
Over a long period of time MUP would indeed work. Assuming consistent relative incomes/equivalent price point, of course. You’re artificially reducing availability, after all..
But you first get that hump of excess mortality where the “old” cases change their behaviour, and you just hope the “new” cases don’t pick up on that behaviour.
Or people rediscover the wonders of Home Brew. And buildng an efficient-ish still is ..trivial.. And…
The Law of Unintended Consequences is ever present, and notoriously unforgiving…
Even if it was true, that’s lot of fascism for 150 lives.
@ Grikath
Thanks: that’s a better explanation, presumably because you know more about this than I do. I was just knee-jerk reacting to something that was just *wrong* (not being the Red Queen, I don’t like to believe in things that are impossible, even after breakfast).