The anti-alcohol lobby’s new tactics
Drinking alcohol is bad for you. Remember what happened to the notorious pissheads Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, George Best, Mary Winehouse and Kurt Cobain? All dead. And Charlie Sheen, Miley Cyrus, Pete Doherty cannot be feeling too well after their many close encounters with the bottle.
Looks like the UK’s media have used the passing away of actor Peter O’Toole on 15 December 2013, aged 81, to remind their readers that the most talented British actors are not to be romanticised or envied. No, according to informed opinion, they were nasty people, who drank so wildly that they left it to their wives and children to pick up the pieces after their deaths.
What they did not say was that all those actors, whose names came up in conjunction with Mr O’Toole’s, were serious alcoholics by anybody’s definition.
Nevertheless, the more insidious insinuation of those so-called obituaries for Mr O’Toole was that alcohol, no matter how small the quantity, was bad for you and even worse for society as a whole.
By using celebrities as negative role-models in its fight against alcohol, the anti-alcohol lobby seems to have changed tack. Whereas before they always used medical research to hammer home their message, they have now gone for a more populist approach.
Even sober scientists have fallen for this: on 13 December 2013 the highly respected British Medical Journal published a – light-hearted – piece of research on the fictional character James Bond. The scientists concluded, after having read all the Bond novels while diligently jotting down the number of drinks he took, that Her Majesty’s best agent would have been an impotent alcoholic and not the best shot in the Secret Service.
In austerity-ridden Britain, there has been a renewed interest in the “good old days” of the 1960s and 1970s, when a George Best (a brilliant soccer player, in case you have never heard of him) would say he “spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars – the rest I just squandered”, and the nation just smiled indulgently as it would on a precocious child.
Fie, fie! Had the nation forgotten that these were also the days “when a member of the Rolling Stones could start a relationship with a child, Phil Spector could murder his girlfriend, Ike Turner could beat up Tina and Norman Mailer – the hard man of American letters, with a reputation for drunken literary brawls – could go unpunished for plunging a knife into his wife’s neck” as The Guardian newspaper wrote?
Several of those harsh criticisms of dead celebrities made the rounds (in translation) in continental newspapers and were accompanied by renewed calls for more government regulation of alcohol.
On 21 December 2013, The Economist, the politicians’ must-read newspaper, ran a leader which argued for raising the price of booze through taxes levied on a drink’s strength. The Economist reminded its readers that “deaths linked to drinking have tripled since 1990; in that time alcohol has gone from the sixth to the third leading cause of death and disability worldwide. The bill lands on everyone, as does booze-fuelled violence. Including lost output, the harm from alcohol costs Europe and America around 1.5 percent of national income.”
If I were to make an educated guess, I’d say that in 2014 alcohol will be on top of many governments’ agenda. As they only have three policies at their disposal – taxation, a curb on advertising and a restriction on sales – many governments will probably tinker with some or a combination of all three.
That’s why all should watch Scotland. It passed legislation in 2012 to set a minimum price of GBP 0.50 (USD 0.80) for a unit of alcohol. A legal challenge will be heard in February. If the law is enacted, others may follow – Ireland is keen. The British government rejected the policy in 2013, but has promised to think again.
Another place to watch is Berlin. Shortly before Christmas 2013, two boroughs (incidentally they are the hipsters’ borough of Kreuzberg and the borough of Mitte, where all the tourists hang out) passed regulations for a blanket ban on outdoor advertising for cigarettes and alcohol. Whether these bans are within the federal law is currently being investigated. They may not be and the boroughs’ resolutions will be no more than very blatant political grand-standing. But as the contracts for outdoor advertising are usually signed between the municipalities and specialist outdoor advertising companies, the outdoor advertisers may have to drag the municipalities to court if they are unhappy with the new terms.
In the light of these developments, the alcohol industry had better come up with new arguments and strategies. Insisting on free choice and free markets will no longer cut them any slack with the regulators.
