More alcohol pricing bollocks and a new angle for the righteous to try.

by | Nov 19, 2010 | Ban It, civil liberties, Economic Intrigue, Health, Just plain weird, Please fuck off., Righteous Wankers, Strange Thoughts, UK Misery, Well I never.

Another day dawns and another Doctor takes time off from what he is paid to do to lecture us all on our choice of lifestyle.

From the Torygraph (emphasis mine) :

Raise VAT on alcohol but not in pubs: doctor

Tax on alcohol sold in supermarkets should be increased, while it should be reduced on drinks sold in pubs to help save lives and help struggling publicans, a leading liver doctor has said.

Dr Nick Sheron, from Southampton University, said that higher levels of Value Added Tax applied to a coffee drunk in a shop compared to one taken away and suggested this principle should be reversed for alcoholic drinks.

He said public health would improve as a result and the pub industry would be supported at the same time.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Dr Sheron said this would be a way around the minimum price per unit of alcohol policy which is unpopular with ministers

A Department of Health commissioned study found setting a minimum price of 30 pence per unit would prevent 300 deaths a year, 40 pence about 1000, and 50 pence more than 2000.

Dr Sheron said: “For someone consuming 15 units a week, the difference between 30 and 40 pence a unit is £1.50, whereas my patients with alcohol related cirrhosis consume a mean of 100 units, and in some cases up to 400 units a week—a difference of £10 and £40. This would have a substantial impact.”

However, politicians are wary of this policy as the proceeds would go to the drinks industry instead of benefiting the Treasury.

Other than the usual old guff spouted ad nauseam that last line looks to me like the Doctor has actually admitted what the government has thought in private all along. They want to raise taxes on alcohol rather than cut consumption and with the constant demonising through their paid mouthpieces (Doctors and fake charities) are moving opinion towards accepting a rise in the interests of public health.

As for the new angle mentioned in the post title, I wouldn’t be surprised if Alcohol Concern (and all the rest of the bansturbator tendency) start using a new route to attack consumption – “Drinking alcohol makes your children more likely to kill themselves”.

If they take note of the following Pravda article (which already draws some of the conclusions they would love to use) then I doubt that it will be too long before we start hearing this new meme, along with a whole raft of completely made up statistics to boot :

In most cases, children commit suicides because of family problems. An eleven-year-old boy hung himself several days ago in Russia’s Altay region in an attempt to make his parents quit drinking alcohol. His mother found the boy hanging on a rope in a barn.

The boy was living with his mother, a 31-year-old unemployed woman, his step-father and five siblings. His mother and step-father were alcoholics; the child repeatedly asked them to stop drinking threatening to commit suicide otherwise, officials said.

On November 11, 2010, the parents went to visit their friend living in a house nearby. The boy begged them to stop drinking and come home, but the parents just told him to go away and hang himself, if he wanted to. The next morning, his mother found the boy in the barn dead.

Prosecutors of the investigation committee of the Altay region instituted criminal proceedings against the boy’s parents on Article 11 of the Penal Code of the Russian Federation – “Incitement to Suicide.”
According to investigators, the boy, the oldest child in the family, killed himself because of the anti-social lifestyle of his parents.

“This is a long-standing problem. The more people drink in the country, the harder it gets to struggle against child and teen suicide. Children are incapable of realizing the line between life and death. The inner world of children is all about kindness. A child always loves his or her mother, and it does not matter whether she drinks or mistreats them. I’ve had many incidents like this one in my practice. In the Arkhangelsk region, for example, a nine-year-old girl drowned herself and left a note in which she asked her father not to drink. A 12-year-old boy was found hanged in the Yaroslavl region. The boy committed suicide because his grandmother, with whom he lived, was an alcohol addict. It is the society, but not the medics or anyone else, that plays the main role in preventing child and teen suicide,” psychiatrist Igor Yanushev told Pravda.Ru.

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