The Drunken Scotsman

By Steve Hynd

My homeland has always had a reputation as a boozing nation. In fact, alongside our likewise hard-drinking cousins the Irish, the joke is that without alcohol we would have conquered the world. And we had a good stab at it even so, as the engine room of the British Empoire and originators of many of the ideas that ended up in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights as a light for the world.

But alcohol has always been Scotland's bane, it's escape from social and economic deprivation that caused more poverty and heartache in return. Never more so than in recent years when it has fuelled a kife-and-yobs subculture which has seen violence soar to ignominious world-record levels (although murder rates are still lower than America's proving that guns don't kill people but they certainly help a lot). Moreover, when teens rebel against their elders they rarely err on the side of abstinence, and so Scotland has a problem with hard drugs which is a direct consequence of its drinking culture too.

So, a new study has been published which claims to show that, after taking into account road deaths and cancers caused by hard boozing, Scotland's drinking problem accounts for better than one in twenty of all deaths. That's one death every three hours and far higher, almost double, what earlier estimates had said. There are calls for the political parties to put aside their usual partisan sniping and take concrete action - including price fixing.

Dr Peter Terry, chairman of the British Medical Association Scotland, urged political parties to unite behind the SNP government's plans for minimum pricing to combat alcohol abuse.

Speaking at the BMA's annual conference, he said: "We must first stop the year-on-year increase in alcohol-related illness.

"The minority SNP government has proposed some quite radical legislative suggestions to tackle this problem, including a minimum unit price. In Scotland this suggestion will require the support of MSPs from the other political parties.

"I implore them to put party differences aside and provide that support. They, and the Scottish people they represent, must address the exponentially growing problem of alcohol-related disease in all its forms and the only proven way to do that is to include legislation on the price of alcohol as part of that strategy."

Labour spokesperson Cathy Jamieson endorsed Dr Terry's call for political unity.

She said: "We need a national consensus to tackle Scotland's hard-drinking culture involving all of our political parties, health organisations, the police and the industry itself. Labour has suggested a ban on billboards advertising alcohol near schools and a mandatory code of practice for retailers, but we will look seriously at any credible proposals from any source that will reduce the level of problem drinking in Scotland."

Tory health spokesperson Mary Scanlon warned the government should not rely on pricing as a "single tool solution".

The aim with such a price fixing policy would be to set the unit price high enough to deter, but not so high as to create a black market demand. Increasing the price would most effect young drinkers, who are most likely to binge-drink and suffer a higher than average number of alcohol-related deaths. But the Tories are also right that existing legislation, like that against licensed stores selling to under-age drinkers, is more often observed by breaking it than not.

Scotland has always had a drink problem, but now it is being forced to admit the true severity of that problem. One death every three hours in a population of about 5.5 million. Yet Scotland isn't that much more of a boozy culture than, say, Texas where I now live - and Texas' drunk-driving limits and enforcement are a joke by Scottish standards for just one example. Scotlands rude awakening should be an alarm call for others too.