Booze pricing

A report buried inside yesterday’s Guardian [1] started off:

Heavy drinking is a major cause of a 25% increase in deaths from liver disease in England in under a decade, according to the government’s specialist NHS unit on terminal care.

The first report from the fledgling National End of Life Care Intelligence Network warns that the victims of liver disease are getting younger, with deaths increasing among people in their forties. Deaths rose from 9,231 in 2001 to 11,575 in 2009; some 60% of these were men, and 90% of them were under 70.

Deaths are more common in England’s northern regions marked by high unemployment and low educational achievement.

(My emphasis.) Now, this is surely the bleedin’ obvious – the poorer you are, the more you drink to alleviate your daily stress. The obvious corollary is that, to get drinking down, you need to improve economic and social conditions. Pretty much the same applies to illegal drugs. However, liberal and reactionary moralists can’t be doing with that, and instead of treating the cause they aim at the symptoms:

The British Liver Trust called for higher alcohol prices, taxing of high fat food, and testing for viral hepatitis, and said: “The current nature of the disease means that people are diagnosed late in their condition. This exposes the inadequacies in our healthcare in identifying patients early and also the lack of will to invest in prevention strategies that will have a serious impact, such as alcohol pricing, taxing high fat foods and testing for viral hepatitis.”

The Tory regime is now proposing minimum alcohol pricing [2]. This is pretty much the same old bourgeois complaint about the sozzled lower orders, a complaint that goes back centuries. The higher orders can be trusted to drink responsibly, and not to make a scene (such as getting pissed on a Saturday night in town). Perhaps if liberals were to spend as much effort campaigning against the evils of neo-liberal capitalism as they do on telling the lower orders how they should behave, they might have some influence on the cause of drug abuse rather than its symptoms.

Whilst increased fag pricing might have effects on smoking tobacco, increased booze pricing will just change boozing behaviour. More folk will get into home brew, which is easy enough to make, even if the result (at least from cheapo kits) isn’t a patch on the real thing. If you want to get pissed, though, home brew is cheap, easy and you can make it as strong or weak as you want. Kits don’t contain alcohol so aren’t affected by alcohol taxes, and if the ruling regime tries to tax them then you’ll just get more dry kits coming out. When it comes down to it, producing beer is a pretty simple process: roast your barley, boil and mash it, add some hops if you want, then bung in yeast and perhaps sugar and wait for those lovely microbes to do their work. Which is why beer has for so long been the drink of the working class, because it’s so easy to make. For those wanting stronger stuff, distilling is easy enough too  as the poitìn makers of Ireland and moonshiners of the US clearly demonstrate. Even school pupils doing Chemistry learn how to distil as a basic skill.

Pubs and microbreweries will suffer under increased booze prices, of course, but the blue and yellow Tories don’t give a monkeys about them, and indeed would welcome fewer pubs in inner cities as that’s where workers get together and discuss sedition and rebellion (though, as we all know, the revolution starts after closing time).

The simple fact is that humans want to get out of our heads, and we’ve been doing it for millennia going by archaeological finds as far back as the neolithic. If moralists stop us using one psychotropic drug, we’ll just find another to take its place. An unintended consequence of pricing workers out of alcohol will be a rise in the consumption of illegal drugs, with all the healthcare costs that implies. Perhaps there’ll also be an increase in grow your own cannabis. You can’t grow tobacco plants in this climate, but hemp grows like crazy on rough ground and doesn’t require curing or preparation, and you can get the seeds easy-peasy from legal and illicit sources.

[1] Alcohol abuse contributes to big rise in deaths from liver disease. Guardian, 22/3/12

[2] Minimum price for alcohol planned. BBC News, 23/3/12

Psst! Got any fags under the counter? (take 2)

As signalled back in May of this year, the regime has today announced that the public display of cigarettes will be banned [1]. The reason? For the sake of the children, think of the children (cue South Park sketch):

Alan Johnson [Health Secretary for England] said: “They see the point of sale display and as a result of seeing it, it encourages them to take up smoking. This is the key evidence as to why we have 200,000 11 to 15-year-olds smoking.”

So that’s why kids smoke, because all those shiny packets are right there in front of them so near yet so close, like jars of sweeties. What kid can resist the magpie allure of a packet of Embassy Regal or Superkings, with their cool ‘Smoke and you die horribly’ messages plastered artfully across their covers? Surely a temptation too far, any Right-minded person would agree.

Of course, this is bollocks. Kids and teens smoke for all sorts of reasons, the visibility of fag packets being a long, long way down the list. You want to look like a hard nut, you want to look cool, you want to hang out with the ‘smoking crowd’ under the science block, you want to be rebellious - those were all reasons why I and my schoolmates smoked. Add to that these days a future of unemployment punctuated by spells of casual labour in McJobs and you’ve got depression and lack of self-respect to add to the list. If the regime really wanted to tackle smoking, binge-drinking, and drug-taking amongst young people, it would address the causes of these problems, but that would mean directly criticising the capitalism and obscene wealth inequalities (such that a CEO can ‘earn’ 400 times more than an ordinary worker) that NuLabor and its Thatcherite predecessors have worked so hard to create. After decades of privatisation and neo-liberal ‘economics’ with domestic manufacturing industry mostly destroyed, there are piss-all jobs for the working class to do. The chattering classes whitter endlessly about ‘dependency culture’ and ‘dysfunctional families’ without having the brains to realise that it’s their consumption, and their votes, which have been crucial to the emergence of such a savage form of capitalism.

But no, we can’t be doing with criticising capitalism and pointing the finger to it as the cause of societal ills, perish the thort. Instead, you blame the victims and take cosmetic measures that assuage the consciences of the chattering classes and single-issue lobby groups like ASH and, laughably, the BMA. (Doctors telling us to be responsible in our drug-taking? That’s like Peter Stringfellow preaching sexual abstinence (see Physician Heal Thyself).)

The purpose of this latest wheeze is the same as that of all the other anti-smoking measures: stigmatisation. Turn people who smoke into either passive pitiable suffering victims or evil subhuman scum. Turn them, indeed, into ‘smokers’, whose life and character is defined by burning the evil weed. (See Psst! Got any fags under the counter? earlier this year.) This tactic is working, not surprisingly in a society of minimal political consciousness that blames others for its misfortunes. Crap housing and McJobs? Blame all the feckless immigrants and asylum seekers. Child poverty? Blame ‘dysfunctional families’ and ‘welfare dependency’. High public spending? Blame fatties, smokers and druggies for putting a “burden on the NHS” (and certainly don’t blame the billions spent on ‘defence’ and Trident, that would be unpatriotic).

Blame everyone else but yourself, or, more importantly, the very economic and political system that we labour under. Once upon a time, when there was such a thing as political and class consciousness, we’d have ‘left-wing firebrands’ pointing the finger at capitalism and calling for concerted worker action, but the destruction of the Labour Movement after the defeat of the miner’s strike [2] put paid to that. Now the Great British Public ^[TM] has the collective political consciousness of a lobotomised flea and is literally incapable of seeing systemic problems, so that such problems come almost literally like a bolt from the blue, as acts of a capricious god. In an atomised society without community or solidarity, we can only see individuals and groups as the problem, and can only lash out wildly at them as we seek scapegoats for ills which are structural, an integral and inevitable part of  modern capitalism.

Which of course suits the rulers very nicely indeed, thankuverymuch. Keep the plebs fighting amongst themselves and they’ll not even notice the Suits and Nobs, let alone unite against them.

[1] Ban on tobacco displays announced. BBC News, 9/12/08

[2] Thanks a bundle, Nottingham. See “The Miner’s Strike and its legacy: thanks a bundle, Nottinghamshire” on Harry’s Happy Hamster Home.