Alcohol Costs
There are many mysteries about the binge-drinking epidemic - not least why the British are so uniquely wedded to the idea that you can’t have fun unless you’re falling over
Not like those responsible French, who in 2003 had about 5 times the number of deaths related to drinking and driving as we did.
Alcohol misuse costs the National Health Service £1.7 billion a year; at peak times 70% of A&E admissions are alcohol-related; half of all violent crimes every year are linked to alcohol; the cost of crime linked to alcohol misuse is £7 billion a year.
Which is terrible for the NHS, except that drinkers more than compensate for this. The revenue figures for 2001:-
In 2000-01 HM Customs and Excise collected £6.7 billion from duty on alcohol
So, drinkers pay something like 4 times what they cost the NHS.
As for “linked to”, that’s a statistic based on whether an offender had anything to drink in the previous 4 hours. One can of 2% Carling C2 2 hours earlier counts as an alcohol-related crime. It is not considered whether the alcohol had any bearing on their behaviour.
No wonder the British Medical Association issued a call to arms last week with a report that said longer licensing hours, combined with the availability of ever-cheaper alcohol, had resulted in a full-blown epidemic.
Not really worth bothering about then. Seeing as an epidemic is defined by Chambers as: a sudden outbreak of infectious disease which spreads rapidly and affects a large number of people, animals or plants in a particular area for a limited period of time then all we need to do is wait and it will disappear*
*(if any readers can remember where I read this attack on the use of the term “epidemic”, please tell me and I’ll link and give credit)
RSS
[…] * A note on the “costs” of drinking. […]
[…] should pay for the NHS? OK, sounds reasonable. Going back to an earlier pre-budget post, the costs to the NHS are £1.7bn, the tax raised is £6.7bn. Sainsbury’s pay that tax […]