Do you think that a minimum pricing of alcohol should be brought in? > Reviews (9)

Our towns and cities have become no go zones after dark; we have all seen the pictures of skimpily dressed young women passed out drunk by the side of the road while the guys throw punches at each other before heading for a kebab and a taxi home. My local town even has street pastors at the weekend who volunteer their services to pick up drunks and keep them safe from themselves and each other.

Binge drinking is estimated to cost the country £20 billion a year in costs to the NHS, policing, and various other things. One in 26 hospital admissions in the UK are drink related and alcohol plays a part in 46% of all assaults. Almost 9000 die early each year due to drink related illnesses and of course there is the human cost of alcoholism in terms of reduced quality of life and family breakdown.

It is clear that the UK has a problem with excessive alcohol consumption and the SNP government have brought in new minimum price for a unit of alcohol because they believe this will help to change the drinking culture in Scotland eventually leading to us behaving in a far more civilised way towards alcohol. The new minimum price will be set at 50p per unit and will come into force next year. The extra money at the tills will go to the retailer and drinks manufacturers and not into the government’s coffers.

In practical terms this will mean that a bottle of wine will cost at least £4.69, a bottle of spirits over £13 and the cheap tramp juice cider will cost £4.20 instead of £1.69 for a 2 litre bottle. Buckfast tonic wine which is associated with youths causing mayhem on the streets of Scotland will still cost the same as before as it is already more than 50p a unit.

I am broadly in favour of minimum pricing for alcohol; some of the drinks promotions I have seen have sold booze at ridiculously low prices. A local nightclub had a deal on a Wednesday night where you paid a tenner on the door and then could have all you could drink for free, human nature being what it is then people wanting to get as much as possible for their money could drink ridiculous amounts. A bottle of Lambrini wine costs a mere £1.80 for a bottle, it tastes revolting but since Lambrini girls just want to get pissed then that will not put them off. When I was a teenager we would load up on the cheap cider before going out clubbing, the prices of the cheap and nasty stuff have actually fallen in the 17 or so years since I used it to get drunk.

I think the price per unit is too high. I am really annoyed that me, a moderate drinker, will not be able to get the £10 bottles of Smirnoff or whisky in the pre-Christmas deals which happen every year. Pub drinkers will not see a change in prices so I doubt whether there will be much of a difference on a Saturday night. I wonder what will happen to the cheap nasty brands once the minimum pricing comes in, will we see Lambkin and Special Brew disappear completely as people who bought them for pennies switch to nicer brand when the prices rise?

The people this measure will hit in the pocket are the hardcore alcoholic and teenage drinkers.

The hardcore alcoholic will simply buy their booze anyway (I once saw a sad sight in Asda where an inadequate looking guy had a trolley full of Smart Price cider and nothing else) and probably spend even less on food and other essentials. The teenage drinker will be able to buy slightly less for their money and that can’t be a bad thing although kids will club together anyway.

I don’t think hitting people in the pocket can change the booze culture of Britain. As long as getting so hammered you can’t stand is acceptable and even applauded then the binge drink culture won’t change. One thing I would like to do is teach teenagers to drink sensibly and learn their own limits by drinking slowly and listening to their bodies; my 13 year old stepniece recently had her first encounter with alcohol and being a tiny little thing gulping down neat vodka as quickly as possible left her in a much worse state than her friends. Not even a night of vomiting and wetting her pants put her off drinking and no doubt it is a night her and her friends will look back on and laugh at instead of being horrified about. Letting kids drink wine or other drinks at family parties will hopefully let them experience the effects of alcohol in a more controlled setting but even that will not be enough to change the deeply ingrained culture of heavy drinking that exists.

I am broadly in favour of the minimum alcohol pricing but wish that it didn’t have to hit moderate drinkers like me in the pocket. Other countries where they have low cost alcohol in Europe don’t seem to have the same problems with binge drinking as Britain does so it shows that the price is not the only thing affecting drinking patterns. Most of us have the ability to drink sensibly and moderately and not make fools of ourselves after a night out so it is a shame we have to pay a bit more because of the actions of the idiots.