Over A Barrel

With the boozers open 24/7 and a police crackdown round the corner, Ben Tuxworth wonders where loving the alcohol and hating the harm will take us – and whether we’ll ever be sustainably squiffy.

It’s time to go home. We’re laughing as we finish our pints, surrounded by contented revellers. I’ve just been accosted by a well-dressed young man, who wants to tell me that a) he has no debts; b) my friends and I are ‘ace’ and c) he owes no-one a thing. Oh and by the way did he mention how great we are?

“Fugging ace!” Charmed, we prompt him for more clues as to his financial situation and opinion of us. It’s great fun, and he seems happy in a confused way. As for me, I’m not about to fall over, but it’s definitely taxi home territory, and in the cab I mentally tot up the costs and benefits of a quiet Thursday night at the pub – eight (possibly nine) units, a bit of a giggle, 30 quid and probably a fuzzy head when the alarm clock rings at 7am.

“I didn’t realise it, but I was technically on a binge.”

No police, no violence, no problem. But were we drinking responsibly? Not according to the Department of Health, by whose standards we were all well beyond ‘sensible drinking’ (3-4 units a day for men; 2-3 for women).

Though I didn’t realise it, I was technically on a ‘binge’ (eight or more units in a sitting – and just six for women) and well on the way to ‘very heavy drinking’ if my consumption were to be extrapolated out to the rest of the week. And our new best friend was certainly getting dangerously close to the antisocial end of the spectrum. Staggering off into the gloom, amongst his possible destinations was the A&E room, where 70% of night-time admissions are now linked to drinking.

There he might well have met up with a few fellow contributors to the £1.7 billion costs of alcohol-related harm borne by the NHS, some also fresh from playing their part in the £7.3 billion annual costs of alcohol-fuelled crime and public disorder. Along with hangover-borne absenteeism and a spread of other ‘social costs’ of alcohol misuse, the total figures must make sobering reading for the chancellor, with a £20 billion cost to set against his £7 billion excise duty revenue.

Out of our heads

Where did it all go wrong? At the time of my first encounter with pubs, sometime in the late 1970s, the norm for alcohol consumption was around 7 litres per capita per year. Twenty-five years later and it’s a nearly half as much again – creeping up towards ten litres. A mixture of social, psychological and maybe physical dependency, summed up as ‘taking the edge off’, dominates the leisure time of a growing number of people.

For a significant part of the generation younger than me, hoovering up vast quantities of beer, wine and spirits is now both an end in itself, and at weekends the hors d’oeuvre to a Class A main course of clubbing, ecstasy, ketamine and cocaine. Though a shift from pints of Scruttocks Owd Dirigible to Tequila Body Slammers in one generation may mark some kind of progress, the worrying trend seems to be that more and more of us just want to get out of our heads.

“Though a shift from pints of Scruttocks Owd Dirigible to Tequila Body Slammers in one generation may mark some kind of progress, the worrying trend seems to be that more and more of us just want to get out of our heads.”

The recent furore about the reform of licensing laws brings back into focus a debate that has raged from time immemorial, perhaps since the first stone-ager overdid it on the fermented turnips. The eternal triangle of producers, consumers and regulators marks its relationships with a love-hate exchange of laws, campaigns, taxes, marketing and protest that ebbs and flows down the centuries, imbuing our culture with a boozy thread that connects and binds us at home, at work, at play.

The exchange has taken a particular turn in the UK, prompted by rising alcohol consumption in the last decade. While other nations including France, Italy, Germany and the US have actually reduced per capita intake in the same time period, harmful drinking by a range of ‘niche consumers’ rises remorselessly here. Young women are perhaps the starkest example.

According to The Guardian, 10% of women aged 16-24 now drink more than 35 units per week, taking them into ‘very heavy drinker’ territory, with a cohort of 11-15 year-olds hot on their heels at ten units a week.

Peak alcohol

So what are we doing about it? The government’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy emerged from the prime minister’s Strategy Unit in 2004, apparently in isolation from the Home Office’s plans for new licensing laws and police powers. Identifying alcohol misuse in four categories (health, crime, productivity and harm to the family), the Strategy insists upon the measurable reduction of ‘harmful modes’ of drinking, to be tracked by indicators such as the ‘number of incidents of alcohol-related violent crime’.

These ‘harmful modes’ include both chronic and binge drinking. But in a context where all industry suppliers are planning to increase their production and sales into the UK market, it sounds like a no-win situation. Some pressure groups regard the strategy as a victory for the drinks industry. So can a plan to decrease alcohol-related harm, whilst not opposing rising consumption, actually deliver?

“Can we talk about a vision of sustainable alcohol use?”

It’s at this big picture level that some fundamental questions have yet to be answered. What would sustainable alcohol use look like? When and why will we reach peak alcohol? And at the top of the list the question we hardly dare ask: why do so many people want to get pissed so often?

On a bad line from a taxi somewhere in London, SABMiller’s Alan Knight responds to some of my questions about sustainable alcohol use. As head of social accountability, it falls to Knight to manage the social and environmental responsibility strategies of one of the largest drinks companies in the world. Not one to mince his words, he once described the warehouses of his previous employer, B&Q, as “museums of environmental destruction”.

But clearly now is not the moment to get a colourful quote about what might be going on in pubs: “These are sensitive questions for the industry at a time when we’re under intense scrutiny.” A neutral question then: does sustainable development thinking offer anything new to the debate about alcohol?

“It’s undoubtedly a useful framework for us to map the positives and negatives in what we do, and try to manage them better. For example, alcohol is a natural product, and provides a livelihood for millions of people, not least farmers in developing countries. The drinks industry is also a significant user of water, energy, transport and packaging. And undoubtedly there is harm resulting from the misuse of alcohol by a tiny percentage of its consumers.

But there is also growing evidence that low levels of alcohol consumption may have health benefits. Rather than go for knee-jerk bans, sustainable development thinking means we can have a sensible conversation about these very disparate effects.” And he’s right, in that our conversation has already punctured my factoid-stoked zeal to put the boot into the producers. OK – there is an upside to alcohol, in production and in use. But where are we headed? Is it meaningless to talk about a vision of sustainable alcohol use – and make a plan to get there?

“Italians drink as much as we do, but drunkeness is less common.”

“We already know what that looks like,” says Knight. “A world where alcohol is used responsibly has some basic rules – no drink driving, no drinking in pregnancy, no binge drinking. And there are other forms of harm that everyone wants to minimise. But from then on it gets much more culturally specific. Italians drink as much as we do, but drunkenness is less common and frowned upon, and harm, if it occurs, comes more from chronic use than bingeing.

In parts of Africa where we operate, the main source of harm is from drinking homebrew, so it’s actually beneficial if consumers switch to much better regulated branded products. And even though it might be possible to define a saturation point for alcohol use – in terms of units per head of population – there are still huge differences in terms of the type of drink, the pattern of consumption, the frame of mind of the consumer and the place of consumption.”

The £20 billion drinks bill

But culturally specific costs still have to be met somewhere – so who pays, and how? Forum for the Future’s David Bent has been working with a leading alcohol company on just such a question, developing a methodology by which an individual supplier could calculate its share of that £20 billion total social cost identified by the government. “We applied a technique called participative accounting – asking stakeholders where they’d place the responsibility for social costs. In this case it involved people from the industry, consumer groups and campaigning NGOs like Alcohol Concern getting round the table to agree the split.

It’s relatively easy to work out the share of the total alcoholic drinks market, though of course there are arguments about whether particular kinds of drinks are more ‘harmful’ than others. What was novel about our work was getting different stakeholders to identify where they believed responsibility lay for misuse, and converting their assumptions on responsibility and what to do about it into concrete numbers.

The company now has a platform to begin a debate with consumers, the Treasury and others on where next for the industry.” The work even reached a tentative consensus on responsibility: A three-way split, with consumers allocated half the costs, and industry players running up a tab proportional to their profits, with retailers getting the lion’s share and producers much less.

A good start, if we can begin to put numbers on harm reduction, and take appropriate action on it. Stakeholders are keen to see different marketing messages, more effort on supporting public health campaigns (including an innovative idea to sponsor counselling for first-time alcohol-related offenders), and more vigorous pursuit of a sustainable business model. Critically, the study also found that it would be cheaper for the company to address the concerns of its stakeholders directly than for the state to try to mop up the social costs later on.

More grist for the mill then, that over time, prevention pays. The logical next step would be to offer a prevention programme to the Treasury in return for relief on taxation. But reducing harm by means of clever recycling of excise duty – or even by the more conventional means of raising the price – has a distinctly end-of pipe feel to it. We Brits already pay 72 times more duty on wine than do our French neighbours and it’s even possible that reducing consumption through price signals could just shift misusers on to cheaper drugs or glue.

Food, shelter, creativity

“The big question,” says consumption specialist Tim Jackson, “is whether harm is just an unfortunate and avoidable by-product, or endemic to the system of alcohol production and consumption. Alcohol policy is a great example of navigating the boundary between letting people do what they want, and not compromising the public good.”

“Alcohol policy is a great example of navigating the boundary between letting people do what they want, and not compromising the public good.”

Jackson, professor of sustainable development at Surrey University, is part of the sustainable production and consumption round table that the government hopes will come up with answers to some pretty tough questions – particularly what unsustainable consumption looks like and what we might do about it. “In the case of alcohol,” he says, “you can argue that the system promotes not just use but also harmful use, and in that sense is inherently unsustainable as costs start to outstrip benefits.

That said, a system in which rising alcohol consumption equals plenty of sales, and thousands of happy people choosing to sink a skinful of beer rather than question their lot, obviously has significant short-term appeal to industry and government alike.”

“If we’re serious about reducing alcohol misuse, we’d be looking upstream at the way we’re satisfying need, and how we can displace alcohol with other more beneficial satisfiers.”

Easy then, to get a bit cynical about these two players tackling misuse, and Jackson certainly seems unpersuaded by the current approach. “Consumption is always about trying to satisfy the same old basic needs – needs which include food and shelter but also participation, idleness, belonging, creativity and community. If we were really serious about reducing alcohol misuse, we’d be looking upstream at the way we’re satisfying need, and how we can displace alcohol with other more beneficial satisfiers.

But there’s not much policy activity in this area except in the rather fraught idea of sustainable communities – which could mean some of these things, but in practice has more to do with cheap housing.” Anyway, another Thursday and I’m off to the pub. I probably won’t bump into my new friend again – now that turning out time is one of the lost rituals of licensing law. Thinking about it, I might even miss some of the landlord’s rhetorical questions about drinking up, moving towards the door and whether I have a home to go to. Ah well, there’s one he’ll still be able to ask, as we seem no closer to an answer. Haven’t we had enough?


The balance sheet for booze

5 January 2006

Ben Tuxworth