Why is alcohol so cheap?
 

I’ve written some bizarre posts, but this one is bordering on sinister. I hope it’s not perceived as political as I’m not mentioning any country overall (with the exception of one country at the start to show a comparison).

Tobacco in the UK is prohibitively expensive. I’ve never smoked, but a packet of 20 cigarettes is £10. Twenty years ago, it was common for people to smoke 20 a day, so that’s £3650 a year. Yikes! Smoking has definitely reduced due to the cost, and there will of course be health benefits in the future.

Whilst alcohol is expensive in pubs, it’s ridiculously cheap in supermarkets. A 2 litre bottle of cider, for example, can cost £2. You can drink double the recommended healthy limit for £2 a day!

It begs the question why tobacco was hit hard whilst alcohol is still so accessible.

Here goes. I’m not a conspiracy theorist (we hear that a lot right now), but do we think it’s in countries’ interests to have us all living to 90? Older people take up a disproportionate amount of healthcare costs, and whilst I’m in cynical mode, they probably don’t spend much or pay much tax.

It’s well known that excessive alcohol causes diabetes, high blood pressure and heart problems as well as liver disease. Why it’s so cheap then makes no sense. We have works of fiction such as Soylent Green (the film from the cynically-entitled book Make Room! Make Room!” I really reckon the availability of cheap alcohol is done for not too dissimilar reasons, i.e. to reduce life expectancy and old age care costs. Obviously, the flaw in my thought process are the huge costs to treat the conditions I’ve mentioned above.

Yes, it sounds a bit bonkers and deeply sinister, but does anyone else have a suggestion why alcohol’s so cheap?

If nothing else, it’s a good story to make people drink sensibly or not at all.

Alcohol is already taxed heavily in the UK. It makes revenue more money than it costs policing and treating alcoholics. It would be unfair to tax it more.

The state is not a babysitter. It's not its role to stop adults drinking. As long as alcohol tax revenue outstrips the cost to the police and NHS, it's taxed enough.

Alcohol is MUCH cheaper in most of Europe.

It's really cheap here, you could buy 2 litres of wine for 1.99€ fags are 10€ for 20 pack

I think they have this figured out to collect the maximum tax revenue. For one, and this is my speculation based on observation in America, supply is off the charts. I mean you can manufacture alcohol in your house or even prison. Over the last decade or so craft breweries have popped up all over the place. It's fashionable and hey, it keeps the tax revenue coming. They want to collect as much tax revenue as they can without a level that cuts demand and overall revenue and tax revenue.

If we drastically lowered alcohol consumption it would be a huge problem for Governments to raise tax revenue that they are counting on. Its a huge problem with tobacco for governments. The e-cigarette should have all but finished it. They did not count on a stop smoking product to actually work.

Countries make good money on taxes from the sales of alcohol as they do with cigarettes. It came a time when the money the government was making on cigarette sales was not enough to warrant the ongoing health costs of treating the smokers who had chronic illness, hence the push to cut down the amount of people who were smoking.

If you look at 1990 death rate for smoking in the UK it was 147 in every 100,000 people. If you look at the death rate for alcohol in the UK in 2018 it is 12 people per 100,000 people. So why would the government want to lose the money they gain on taxes for selling alcohol when the death rate is so low.

In 2018 there were approximately 7,800 deaths recorded involving alcohol in the UK as opposed to 78,000 deaths from smoking.

A £2.50 bottle of 5% cider is 12 units so for £2.50 you can do your UK weekly units almost in one session. But we know that the unit limit of 14 was a political move and not one to do with medical advice in the UK.

The government is not concerned about the age we are living to but they are concerned about having to treat chronic illness in the UK, and the two big ones are smoking and obesity so I imagine they will be tackling obesity well before drinking.

I’ll have to concede that smoking is more dangerous to health as demonstrated by any life/medical insurance broker. I fully declared my drinking history on a life insurance policy (my
GP had all the details so if I died, it’d be revealed anyway), and after me and my GP giving a whole load of info, it made absolutely no difference to the premium. Smoking, meanwhile, seems to affect any sort of similar policy.

I’m curious about one point. Every country has a so-called healthy limit for alcohol. As you say, the UK’s figure is 14 units a week. You mentioned it’s political as opposed to medical. I naively thought the 14 units was based on research and figures of cancer cases. I’m not disputing what you’ve written at all, I’m just curious of the background to how this figure was derived. I know it’s been changed a few times and was higher for men previously.

Really interesting take on it!

Perhaps persons who drink moderately within healthy limits are the same who show the same traits about everything else in life. It is not that alcohol is beneficial in moderate quantities. It may well be the case that traditional wisdom is valid and moderation is the key when it comes to good health. Teetotallers are probably those who are quite extreme one way or another (or who had to quit because they totally overdid it in the past)

As for the cost... I spent a fortune in both alcohol and cigarettes and much more on alcohol at some point! I don't know how much raising the cost impacts overall behavior. Some nordic countries have very expensive alcohol and still a huge alcohol problem. I am very happy with the savings I am doing and it is a massive relief not to worry about the price of wine

Oh yes, I lived in a country where beer was very expensive, so what did I do? I spent a quarter of my salary on beer!

Good point about the “everything in moderation” type of person.

The literature is really conflicting, though. It suggests a little alcohol is healthier without suggesting any physical reasons why. I wonder how many alcoholics have read that report and used it as an excuse to carry on ☹️

I doubt that it's a conspiracy. A conspiracy that big would be very hard to contain, and a leak would be devastating for the politicians involved. The justification for a "sin" tax only works with the approval of constituents, and considering how many constituents want cheap alcohol, it's more likely that lawmakers and taxmakers don't want to touch the issue.

I probably went a bit Soylent Green when I wrote my opening post 😂

For moderate drinkers (no one reading this), I sort of like the UK idea of a 14 unit limit, though. It’s pretty much impossible to drink every day if you stick to that limit. The idea is to have a normal sized glass of wine, for example, maybe 5 days a week and a couple of days off. If we all drank like that, we wouldn’t even know this site existed. Bit late for that now!

Yeah it will probably be awhile before they call in the scoops, and you hear people in the streets shouting, "The scoops are coming! The scoops are coming!" I loved that movie. I actually have it in my private collection. Haven't watched it for years, but today it's raining, and it would be a good time to dig that one out again.

My big fear of drinking was getting cirrhosis. I already had a “mild” fatty liver, and after 8 months sobriety (and slimness), I scored 7kPa on a liver fibroscan which is normal but on the very edge of normal. In fact, that figure of 7 is based on the average of 10 or so readings throughout my liver, and a few individual readings were above normal. Whilst the consultant was happy, I felt only relief. I reckon I was a few years at the most from having irreversible damage. I felt justified, for want of a better word, when a friend of my wife’s developed alcoholic cirrhosis. Yikes! You don’t want to go there.

For my next conspiracy theory ... no this is just a thought, I reckon some doctors have an estimate of how long and how much alcohol it takes to damage a liver. Genetics plays a big part along with lifestyle, but there must be a point where liver disease is seen most. But imagine if they published figures saying after X beers a day for Y years, you could get liver disease. Again, that’d a green light for drinkers to have X-1 beers a day! I’m always wary when someone asks how much I drank. What can they do with that information? A couple of points - I wouldn’t want anyone to follow my old drinking behaviour, body shape and dull lifestyle. Also, I quit in my late forties, and there are cases of cirrhosis with people in their thirties.

One weakness of information is in how we interpret it. I recall embracing the "I'm not that bad yet" reason to keep on drinking. Someone holds a big red flag saying, "I got liver disease after drinking for 40 years," and we think, "Oh good. I can drink for another 24 years. We read into information what we want to hear, not what we need to know.

A few points.

1. Older people have arguably paid their share of tax in their working years so deserve looking after, IMO. (I am not retired btw).

2. The problem with diseases from smoking and drinking related diseases is that they are not immediate. If I were able to say to you with 100% surety, 'If you smoke that cigarette right now you WILL get cancer and die tomorrow' you might not smoke it. It depends if you believe me or not. This is very different from saying to you with 100% surety, 'If you smoke that cigarette right now you WILL get cancer and die in 10 years' or 'If you smoke that cigarette right now you MIGHT get cancer and die in 10 years.' It comes down to attitude to risk, belief in science and time. You can apply all of this to alcohol too.

3. Slightly off topic but kind of related is this. How much would petrol (gasoline) have to cost per litre for you to consider not using your car for a journey but either cycle, use public transport or car share (inconvenient). Petrol is about £1.35 a litre at the moment in the UK although I know it is much cheaper in other parts of the world. I think that petrol prices in the UK could increase by at least 100%, maybe more, and it would not affect the volume of traffic.

My mate is a GP, we have had this discussion. He said if you drink daily for a decade that will be enough to start it, but you will need at least another decade doing the same to be at the no way back point, and that as you say depends on weight, fitness level, but mostly genetics. He also said that most cirrhosis is not of the alcohol nature.

Not read any posts on this thread simply because why does it matter how much it costs, what the taxes are? Subject for normal drinkers forum. Totally unhelpful for a forum for alcoholics. Mean this in the nicest way xx

I removed some posts.

Dee
Administrator
SR.

Taxing it more won't help. When the Soviets decided to raise taxes on vodka due to rampant alcohilism the Russians had a joke: A boy goes to his father and says " Papa, does this mean you'll drink less now?" Father: "No son, it means you'll eat less." Addicts will find a way. We always do.