Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, a leading liver specialist, tells us that ‘poor’ alcohol regulation could cost 250,000 lives in England and Wales over the next 20 years. God alone knows what he thinks will happen in Scotland where, according to my less scientific reasoning, half the people are aggressive teetotallers (a truly unlovely thing) and the other half have been drunk since childhood.
The figure sounds awful, doesn’t it? 250,000!
Until you realise that around 600,000 people die every year in Britain. So over the next 20 years we would expect 12 million to die, perhaps a few more because the population is growing.
So it turns out that ‘poor’ regulation of alcohol may be (you can’t forecast human behaviour accurately over such a long period), the cause of 1 death in 48, perhaps one in 50, around two percent.
Doesn’t seem too bad now, does it?
Gilmore, who is not a swivel-eyed fanatic, came into the public eye last year with a report that alcohol is more dangerous than many Class A drugs. And I am sure he is right, but he has no idea how to attack the problem, except with the intervention of the State. He says we should learn from neighbouring countries, but as I often point out, here in Italy alcohol costs far, far less than in Britain and yet Italy doesn’t have anything like the scale of the problem.
What we can learn from neighbouring countries is that behaviour is best regulated in small groups: the family, the immediate area. If the State declares that alcohol is naughty, what is a teenager going to do?
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