WHEN hedge fund manager Michael Farmer gave his maiden speech in the House of Lords a fortnight ago, his fellow peers paid attention.

He spoke revealingly about his childhood and the anxiety and shame that were its hallmarks. He was fearful of bringing friends home in case his mother was drunk. He was embarrassed by the small shabby house they had to move to when she had liquidated their assets.

Lord Farmer and his sister were born at the end of the Second World War. Both parents were alcoholic. He said: "My father died from this when I was four and violence was part of that backdrop. We were soon bankrupt and, with a mother still struggling with drink, my sister and I experienced the poverty, neglect and shame that are such potent drivers of social exclusion."

Lord Farmer, co-treasurer of the Conservative party and now a multi-millionaire, knows from harsh experience addiction is no respecter of background, wealth or status. His survival was partly due to securing a place in a boarding house at a state grammar school. His sister was less fortunate. She left school at 14 and struggled with alcohol, depression and broken relationships until she managed to turn her life around.

Drink has always played havoc with the generations. Its abuse damages the alcoholic, the children and the grandchildren. Another reminder of its pernicious influence comes with the publication of shocking statistics about the rise of dangerous drinking among women aged 60 and over. The number being admitted to treatment programmes has risen by 65 per cent in five years.

These are largely professional women who have retired but haven't previously had a drink problem. Many of them must be bewildered to find themselves labelled. So what is happening? We all know a glass or two of wine in the evening is a daily habit for hundreds of thousands of baby boomers. Post retirement and without the demands of the working week, for many it has become a glass or three, maybe four.

Retirement may have brought boredom, loss of identity, social isolation and loneliness. Alcohol was the anaesthetic. Unit by unit, a regular drinker's tolerance level rises until, for some, "I'd like a drink" becomes "I need a drink". According to the charity Drinkaware, the wiring in our brains changes with frequent consumption.

This is what frustrates me about alcoholism: we know so much and yet we seem able to do so little to rid us of this curse. Although figures in Scotland are down from an all-time high in 2008 (when drink related problems cost Scotland more than £2billion) they are still 10 per cent higher than in 1997/98. The new, more stringent, drink-driving limits that come in on December 5 should curb dangerous driving during the party season. But how many people will just stay at home to drink? Minimum pricing at 50p per unit of alcohol will surely be preventative when it comes in. But, like all addicts, those already hooked will find the money somehow.

At root, our society has a split attitude to alcohol. We celebrate with it, relax with it, tell tall tales about its effect. Go to buy a birthday card and you'll find plenty of booze-day ones with references to wine o'clock. But the moment addiction kicks in, the fun departs. The person once sought as "the life and soul of the party" is now shunned. They are an embarrassment, a social misfit. They behave in inappropriate ways, are unpredictable, embarrassing, unreliable or just plain boring.

How hard must it be for a woman who has been a social drinker until her 60s to admit she is now alcohol dependent? Well, 2,736 of this age group started treatment in 2013/2014. That's 9 per cent of newly diagnosed alcoholics.

And for every one admitted for treatment how many are in denial? Ask anyone with an alcoholic in the family and they will tell you it is an illness often accompanied by denial and deceit. Whatever mayhem is wreaked before bedtime, it is wiped from the memory of the perpetrator before breakfast.

Although numbers of older women are on the rise, men still account for two thirds of the 80,929 alcoholics admitted for treatment in the UK last year. That isn't just 80,929 individuals damaged. It's their families and friends too. It's broken- hearted parents or devastated adult children or both. It's partners who are filled with shame and frustration and confused youngsters who can find - in Lord Farmer's words- that they are "loved extremely one day and hated the next".

No two people who suffer this illness are alike and yet there are behaviour patterns. They are patterns that can be read in Dickens and Tolstoy. They are not new. The illness is as old as fermentation. It makes me wonder how - with all the scientific progress we have made and are still making - that we haven't yet cracked addiction?

I find the numbers affected here shocking but in the US last year 17 million people needed treatment at a cost of $223.5 billion. What must the scale of the problem be world-wide? There is rehab for some and help is available from organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous. Drugs can help some people by easing withdrawal symptoms or blocking the metabolism of alcohol and causing nausea. An epilepsy drug is undergoing trials in California for the treatment of alcoholism.

But even in this age of science the main ingredient in recovery seems to remain the individual's desire to beat the addiction and the strength of their willpower to resist the cravings to start drinking again. As Drinkaware says, alcoholism is a spectrum which begins with mild dependency - drinking too much every Friday night - to drink becoming more important than a person's job, their family or even being alive.

It is a Cinderella illness whose victims retreat ever further from the people who love them and who sink from civilisation - some to the park bench or worse. The alcohol-dependent are like the possessed in that their will has been taken over. And yet it is only by dint of reclaiming that willpower that they recover -or reach sobriety one day at a time.

To me it beggars belief science can't do more to help. Surely it is time for an internationally funded research project to combat an international plague? The object will be to find a chemical compound that will prevent our brains getting hooked - or that wipes its effects before irreparable damage is done.

Failing that - or until it happens - why make the minimum cost per unit only 50p? Why pussyfoot around? We have a fight on our hands to get even that through Europe. When we do why not argue for £1.50 a unit? Yes it might limit alcohol to the rich or desperate but at least they will be paying a price that will compensate society for the damage they wreak, for the horrendous cost to the NHS and other public services.

It would avert so many tragedies and save every state a fortune. Most of all it would spare all those children who - like Lord Farmer and his sister - will grow up at its mercy.