Trainspotting author wants laws to end booze culture

SCOTTISH writer Irvine Welsh has called on politicians to take a tougher stance in tackling the UK's binge-drinking culture in which children are being "indoctrinated into believing that alcohol is like lemonade".

The Trainspotting author says the UK government should consider introducing measures to reduce the availability of alcohol, including increasing prices and raising the legal drinking age.

And while he believes that drinking alcohol is a "basic human right", he argued that alcohol has now wrongly become a ubiquitous factor in our lives and can be problematic as a "big gateway" to illegal drug use.

The 49-year-old writer, who has had a reputation for drink and drugs excess both in his fiction and real life, made his comments during an event in Edinburgh last week organised by the Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (SHAAP), a group formed by the country's royal medical colleges.

He told the Sunday Herald that governments should be prepared to introduce unpopular measures, rather than trying to encourage companies to be socially responsible.

"You have got a public health epidemic with alcohol and they have got to look at measures which are tried and tested, such as decreasing availability and increasing price," he said. "If people want to drink, they will drink, but the government shouldn't be assisting the private sector in making it easy to do that.

"Private companies are doing what they do to try to make money and run a profitable business. The government should be setting the parameters and saying this is what is acceptable and this is what is not."

Welsh, who married his American wife in 2005, pointed to the example of the US, where the legal drinking age is 21 and police "ruthlessly" pursue those who provide alcohol to under-age drinkers.

"There is this crucial time, these teenager years in America where they aren't allowed to go into bars and they are not allowed to drink," he said. "They learn to develop a life where alcohol is minimally involved.

"You just don't see in the streets of American cities people staggering about, falling all over the place, throwing up, anything like the extent we do here.

"I feel kind of sad that people here in the UK feel that this is it, this is what constitutes social life and there is nothing else."

But he acknowledged there was a major gap in terms of educational and employment opportunities in deprived communities to encourage people away from drinking.

"If you look at some of the poorer parts of this city and every city across the world, it is easy to say to people don't drink or don't take drugs," he said. "But you can posit the question then of what do you do instead?

"We have not been able to provide the solutions and not been able to provide all the opportunities. We've failed in that.

"So we go back to this kind of Victorian morality of blaming individuals for something that - as a society and as a community - we have been remiss about addressing as an issue.

"If you look at some of the social conditions that people are living in, I'm almost surprised that alcohol consumption isn't higher."

The author, who admitted that alcohol now has a "much smaller" role in his life, argued that the SNP had the opportunity to tackle Scotland's hard-drinking culture in a "radical way".

"I think every subsequent generation will smoke less or drink less if you make things less available and less easy for them to do it," he said. "Cultural change is always achievable in the long run."

There are signs that ministers are preparing to take a tougher stance to tackle alcohol misuse in the UK, which causes 1700 accidental deaths, 1000 suicides and 23,000 emergency hospital admissions every year.

Last week, the UK government warned that shops selling cheap booze could face stiff new laws following an independent review into the relationship between pricing and promotion of alcohol and the harm to health, which is due to report next summer.

Earlier this year, Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill pledged to crack down on irresponsible drinks promotions and the availability of cheap booze as part of efforts to tackle binge-drinking in Scotland.

Professor Gerard Hastings, director of the Institute for Social Marketing at Stirling University, agreed that the interests of public health, government and the alcohol industry would not coincide.

"I do think governments should be asking challenging questions about the price of alcohol which is notoriously cheap and the acceptability of things such as the equivalent of happy hours in supermarkets," he said.

But he added: "As far as their relationship with the alcohol industry is concerned, they do need a productive and fruitful relationship as it is there that the expertise lies about marketing and production."