About a quarter of the grain in Africa is still made into beer, Armelagos says.
People have been getting blitzed since first someone worked out how to get blitzed. People will go and scrape in the fields with a pointy stick to be able to get blitzed.
This let\’s make drugs illegal and no one will want to get blitzed isn\’t really going to work, is it?
We drank 760ml of alcohol at home per person per week in 2006 compared with 527ml in 1992. Outside the home, it was 733ml in 2001/2 and 443ml in 2008.
So adding the 760 to the 443 we get total consumption of 1,203, adding the other two we get 1,260.
So alcohol consumption per head has gone down?
Cheap snack offers in shops and food outlets are as dangerous as happy hour drink giveaways, health campaigners claimed yesterday.
Desperate retailers are bombarding customers with cut-price chocolate, crisps, cakes and fizzy drinks to boost profits.
Nutritionist and obesity campaigner Zoe Harcombe said: “The supermarkets pounce on us at every opportunity and feed the obesity epidemic on their way to profits. Pushing this sort of processed food is as bad for health as selling drinks cheap or offering double measures. There was rightly an outcry about that, there should be similar concern about this.”
Zoe said coffee shops specialise in ever-larger drinks and ask customers if they want a cake, muffin or pastry with their order.
City authorities in Moscow have announced a ban on the sale of spirits between 10pm and 10am, in the most recent of a series of measures designed to break the country\’s drinking habit.
Russia has since increased excise on beer, raised the minimum price of a bottle of vodka to 89 roubles (£1.87) and announced plans to cut sales at kiosks.
Riiiight
An estimated 51% of production is on the black market, with factories running illegal night shifts and huge supplies of moonshine called samogon distilled in villages, where it acts as a second currency.
Err, anyone want to try and outline the cause and effect thing here?
Tough measures to tackle drink-related crime, antisocial behaviour and illness – including a politically controversial minimum price for alcohol – will be recommended by government advisers this week.
The message to ministers from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) will reopen the debate on alcohol policy.
Sigh.
Minimum pricing is illegal under EU rules. EU law trumps UK law.
This is thus illegal.
A group of experts convened by the organisation – its programme development group – has spent almost two years studying how best to reduce alcohol-related disorders, which between them cost an estimated £27bn a year.
That figure covers the cost of healthcare, crime, disorder and lack of productivity attributable to alcohol, including the £2.7n the NHS spends treating the chronic and acute effects of drinking.
The direct costs are more than offset by the £8.4 billion HMRC gets in booze duty.
The indirect costs have to be offset by the joy and glory that people get from consuming alcohol. Estimating this is not simple but we can indeed put a lower bound to it. As people voluntarily hand over their cash for the buzz from having drunk the alcohol, this joy and glory must be worth at least what is paid for the alcohol which produces the joy and glory. That\’s somewhere north of £50 billion a year.
The benefits are therefore larger than the costs: we do not have a problem here.
Action is needed because one in four people drink dangerously high levels of alcohol that can damage physical and mental health, Nice believes.
That level which does start do do damage….well, let\’s define damage actually. If you drink no alcohol then there is some level of nastiness that can happen to you. As you start to imbibe, those nastinesses decrease. We only get back up to teetotal levels of nastiness in the 50-60 units a week range.
No, NICE is not stating that 25% of the population drink at those levels. They are using some other numbers which were randomly pulled out of someone\’s arse a couple of decades back.
So, they\’re lying, we don\’t actually have a problem and their proposed solution is illegal.
Didn\’t we just change governments so that we didn\’t have to deal with this sort of thing any more?
From the Coalition Programme for Government:
We will ban the sale of alcohol below cost price.
I\’m absolutely certain that they\’ve not thought this through.
So, booze wholesaler goes bust (or offie, pub, supermarket, village shop, whatever).
The liquidator comes in and has to shift the stock swiftly in order to get cash back for creditors before rents and storage costs eat any further into the pittance they\’re going to get.
How do you shift stock quickly? You discount it of course.
This is now illegal.
Think that\’s too extreme?
One of the secrets of the Weathersppon\’s empire is that it\’s got such tremendous throughput that it can take stuff a week or a few days before it goes out of date and yet still sell it, at a bargain price of course, to thirsty drinkers across the land. As they\’re just about the only buyers that can do this and the manufacturer or wholesaler who fucked up can either sell to them or pour it down the drains they pay nothing like \”cost price\” for this booze.
This will now be illegal.
And as a final point: since when has it been Conservative or Liberal policy to stop me losing money by selling my manufactures at absolutely any bloody price I choose to?
Hint: just about nobody pays cost price for their telephones these days, do they?
The centuries-old position of ale taster has been reintroduced by a London market, which is describing the role as the \”best job in the world\”.
Might I suggest that applicants read Decline and Fall first?
A similar link between educational attainment and alcohol consumption is seen among men, but the correlation is less strong.
Mmm hmm.
Women\’s alcohol consumption can even be predicted from their scores in school tests taken when they are as as young as five.
Can\’t see any problem with any of this. Those bright enough to understand the rigorous shafting we get from the politicians are those most likely to need a drink or two.
We should of course have concern for the health of those driven to drinking so much that they damage their own health. Fortunately, economists have such a solution. If one group or activity is imposing an externality upon another then that first group or activity should be taxed by the amount of that externality they\’re imposing. This is known as Pigou Taxation.
There\’s no particular reason why such taxation should be purely monetary either. As long as a cost equal to the costs being imposed is imposed then the logic of the system works.
\”People who abuse alcohol face a higher risk of suffering from health problems incluidng cancer, liver cirrhosis, lung and cardiovascular disease, and mental and behavioural issues.\”
That is, the activities of politicians are killing some people. Thus to balance this we should kill some politicians. The ONS tells us that alcohol kills 13.6 per 100,000 each year. Thus we should be killing 13.6 per 100,000 politicians each year. Or, roughly, over a century we randomly select 8 MPs and hang them just pour encourager les autres. Perhaps make it one a decade as a special, to be looked forward to, event.
That seems a little infrequent agreed, but there are 22,000 councillors in England alone meaning that we\’ll also have 3 or so happy jolly gatherings under the gallows each year for our sortition of local politicians.
We should note that there\’s absolutely nothing unusual in the logic here. This is exactly what Lord Stern did in his review to justify higher carbon taxes. If a cost is being imposed then action must be taken to impose the same cost on those imposing the original cost.
Some will quibble that it\’s not the politicians driving people to drink but that\’s clearly ridiculous. Anyone at all who observes them with even the quickest of glances is driven to drink.
I\’ve said this before but why not again?
Norwegian* has a lovely word, \”utepils\”.
It\’s that first beer outside of the spring. The first time that you can, without it being as cold as a witches tit, or perhaps more appropriately, as cold as a broomstick ventilated gusset, sit outside and actually enjoy a beer or two.
No, it\’s not particularly time change related. Just that this year, down here (here out west perhaps?) today was indeed the day.
I have utepilsed this year, have you?
*Norwegian also has another lovely word, jentelus (which now completes my knowledge of the language, all two words) which is analagous to the American \”cooties\” but for which there seems to be no English English equivalent.
At The Times.
Of much greater importance, though, is what such lower limits will do to our opinion of the law in general. A pint at lunchtime could put you over that 20mg limit in the evening commute. A law that punished a man for driving after a pint of shandy would be regarded widely as silly. Such a law would be to the detriment of our reputation as a law-abiding people, a reputation built on the general agreement that we aren’t scofflaws because we tend not to have laws at which we scoff. We most certainly do not want to make the drink-driving laws an object of derision — not after the past few painful decades of convincing everyone that the ones we have are sensible and reasonable.
When there was as an attempt to reduce the permitted level of alcohol consumed in Portugal, the bus drivers took action. They drove in convoy through Lisbon and surrounding towns, bringing the traffic to a halt. The reduction in the limit was scrapped once they had pointed out that it would have abolished every Portuguese man’s God-given right to a copa of vinho with his lunch.
Yes, there really are things that Johnny Foreigner can teach us. Not how to reduce deaths on the road perhaps, but the correct way to react to politicians passing stupid laws.
Concerning this:
THE government has signalled that it plans to cut the drink driving limit to less than a pint of beer or a glass of wine.
Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, expects an official review of the law to recommend reducing the legal limit from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg.
Note this:
The drink-drive changes — which would not require new legislation — would bring Britain into line with almost all other European countries, which have a limit of either 50mg or 20mg.
Yes, it\’s all part of a driove to \”bring us in line with Europe\”. Yes, there have indeed been discussions at EU level to make the limit the same everywhere.
The only problem of course is that this equality is going the wrong way.
You can have two methods of dealing with what I agree is a real problem. You can have a limit which clearly delineates those drunk from those not. The current couple of pints sort of level. And then back it up with serious, even draconian, penalties. Roughly the UK system at present,
You can have a much lower limit, that single glass of wine one, and much lighter penalties. Roughly the system being suggested.
We might even say that yes, everyone should be moving to the same system. OK, now the important question is, which is the best system?
Given that the UK roads are some of the safest in Europe, given that the rate of deaths caused by drunk driving is lower here than elsewhere, everyone should be adopting our system, yes? The one that reduces the problem the most?
Buit we\’re not doing that, are we?
Why?
In restricting alcohol, as in war, the U.K. need only ask: \’What would Churchill do?\’
Open another bottle of course.
Right, that\’s that solved, next!
Measures to combat cheap drink offers and after hours nuisance will be unveiled by the two main parties, signalling an end to inappropriate promotions whatever the general election result.
Who defines \”inappropriate\”?
There are, quite seriously, those out there who insist that serving a third pint of an evening to someone is \”inappropriate\”. Do they get to have their say as well?
Minimum prices for alcoholic drinks would be set by the Government under radical plans being drawn up to cut Britain’s growing binge-drinking problem.
OK, well, we\’ve been told that this is illegal under EU laws for a start. Greece tried the same thing with tobacco and got slapped down.
But given a minimum price then of course the manufacturing of cheap alcohol is about to become hugely profitable, isn\’t it?
A levy could also be imposed on the drinks industry to stop them making windfall profits from the higher prices introduced under the scheme. The money raised would be earmarked for public health campaigns warning of the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption.
Sigh. So why not just increase the duty payable on booze in the first place? That wouldn\’t be in breach of EU law.
And the other thing is that hypothecation of taxes is a very bad idea indeed. We may or may not want to spend £100 million on public health campaigns about booze. We may or may not wish to raise the tax on booze. But there\’s absolutely no connection whatsoever between the amount we can raise by taxing booze and the amount we want to spend on public health campaigns.
Essentially what this amounts to is an untouchable revenue stream for the likes of Alcohol Concern and all the other puritans. No longer do they have to argue their case for getting money ahead of freezing pensioners or the starving in the third world. They get their money as of right.
And of course, the last thing any such bureaucracy will even try to do is solve the problem: the incentive is to keep exisiting on ever larger budgets, not actually do anything.
No, it\’s not just the cretinism of raising alcohol prices (looking across Europe there are countries with lower prices and less drunkenness, places with higher and just as many problems with binge drinking), they\’ve also managed to come up with the worst possible method of doing it. Illegal and creating an independent bureaucracy with no financial oversight.
Twats.
Nice piece at CiF trying to point out that there\’s value to the consumption of booze as well as costs. However, we can sharpen up this a little:
There are personal and social benefits too, although it is by definition difficult to put a numerical value on them: how much is a glass of champagne at a wedding worth, or a few pints down the pub with your friends?
Difficult but we can make a start.
We at least know what the lower bound is.
The value to the person purchasing the alcohol of purchasing the alcohol must be higher than the amount they spend on purchasing the alcohol. If it weren\’t, then they wouldn\’t purchase the alcohol now, would they?
Now yes, this might be diminished by the costs they also bear in cirrhosis, drunken fights and waking up to one of the Two Fat Slags on vomit stained pillows. And it would be right to take those costs into account as well. But as our first order estimate of the consumer benefit of alcohol our lower bound simply cannot be any lower than the amount that people are willing to spend on purchasing alcohol.
The BBC tells me that this number is £38 billion a year.
The UK alcohol market also enjoyed the biggest rise in value, with sales estimated at £38bn – up 15% since 1999.
That\’s a fairly large number to put against that £2.7 billion a year cost to the NHS (however strangely calculated that was).
That the consumption of alcohol has both costs and benefits is obvious: for there are such to everything. But if we\’re going to try and work out whether something is worth it we do need to include the benefits as well as the costs.
The Russian government has set a minimum price for vodka that more than doubles the cost of the cheapest vodka on the market in an effort to fight rampant alcoholism.
The last time they tried this under Gorbachov the country ran out of sugar in two weeks.
Expect to see sales of black pepper rise and similarly, the number of cases of samogon poisoning to rise.
Stephen Foster, a supermarket worker from Gateshead, received a shock was mistakenly paid £1.4 million in wages. …..However, Mr Foster decided not to spend the money and instead contacted his employers to arrange repayment.
The Co-operative have now rewarded his honesty with a crate of Budweiser beer.
![\"budweiser\"](\"https://www.timworstall.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/budweiser-300x187.jpg\" "\\"budweiser\\"")
Interesting….they seem to have changed the shape of Budweiser bottles since I last bought any…..
One of the country\’s most senior doctors has warned that obesity will overtake alcohol as the main cause of liver cirrhosis in the \”not too distant future\”.
Professor Christopher Hawkey\’s comments come as a new poll shows that more than five out of six people are unaware the disease is linked to excess weight. \”Obesity is the biggest health problem we face this century,\” said Hawkey, president of the British Society of Gastroenterology.
Put this alongside the reports that cirrhosis is rising and thus alcohol must be made more expensive.
What if it\’s not the booze but the pokiness that\’s causing the cirrhosis? Where does that leave the insistence that alcohol must rise in price?
A Cheshire brewery has started making alcopops without the alcohol.
So, err, lemonade then?