YOU just need to type the words “Scotland” and “alcohol” into Google to get a sense of how toxic our relationship with booze can be. From the search page alone you will learn from Alcohol Focus Scotland that alcohol harm costs Scotland £3.6billion a year in “health, social care, crime, productive capacity and wider costs”, while alcohol costs the health service in Scotland £267million a year and the cost of alcohol-related crime is £727m a year.
Then there’s the link to a Scottish Government page that says that “as a nation our relationship with alcohol has become unbalanced”, while education agency NHS Health Scotland warns that “although alcohol-related mortality and morbidity in Scotland have fallen, they remain high, and higher than in England and Wales”.
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It is not a pretty picture, and certainly not one we can be proud of. No wonder the Scottish Government, which last year introduced minimum unit pricing as one way of trying to tackle the problem, wants to break the cycle. A number of local health boards have come up with another: ban alcohol from public events where children are present.
In response to a consultation aimed at revamping licensing laws, officials at both NHS Lothian and NHS Shetland said that prohibiting the sale of alcohol at school fairs and gala days would be a positive way to protect children from witnessing the effects of harmful drinking. The Highland Alcohol & Drug Partnership, meanwhile, said the move would present “a real opportunity to think about the ‘normalisation’ of alcohol and young people”. Indeed, the latter noted that “if a public health or societal ideal is for children to grow up and not be affected or harmed by alcohol then a rebuttal of a licence application is a step in the right direction”.
But is that really the case? The recommendations certainly come from a good place – who, after all, doesn’t want to see public health improved? But surely reinforcing the myth that alcohol is in and of itself an immoral, dangerous substance that is not safe to be around runs the risk of reinforcing our already unhealthy relationship with it. Banning alcohol from family events would, in effect, tell our kids it is normal for adults to lock booze away in order to stop themselves getting completely trolleyed when what we should be normalising is the ability for everyone to have a few drinks in a social setting while retaining the ability to walk home sober afterwards.
That walking home sober may seem like an impossibility for some is precisely the result of the way we treat drinking alcohol as something a little bit naughty, a little bit edgy and – crucially – something only adults can do. It should come as no surprise that it has led to us viewing the consumption of alcohol as an act of rebellion rather than something normal we do as part of our daily lives. With a stolen sip from a parent’s glass progressing to a clandestine binge with adolescent friends, it is the way we are conditioned to interact with alcohol, rather than alcohol itself, that poses the biggest danger to public health.
The SNP has made it its mission to turn this relationship on its head, with the restriction of access to the young being a main line of attack. As well as coming up with the minimum-pricing policy back in 2008, then health minister Shona Robison – who was succeeded by now First Minister Nicola Sturgeon – also argued that increasing the age at which youngsters could buy alcohol from off-licences should increase from 18 to 21. The aim, she said, was to “cut the level of uncontrolled, open-air and home drinking which we know can result in antisocial behaviour”.
At the time, debate was raging in the US about whether the legal age for buying alcohol should move in the opposite direction, with the presidents of over 100 universities arguing that restricting access to those over 21 had only served to make youth drunkenness more of an issue. Brown University Professor Dwight Heath, a renowned authority on cultural and societal attitudes to alcohol, went as far as to say that as drinking is a learned behaviour “shaped by a complex combination of observations, warnings and personal experience” it is better to present its consumption to children as an everyday part of family life rather than making it all the more enticing by hiding it away and keeping it out of reach.
“France views drinking as an integral part of everyday life, a sociable custom usually enjoyed at the family table,” he said. “There is no attempt to protect children from learning about alcohol, including the hazards of drinking too much or too fast.”
The message sent was loud and clear: continuing to restrict access to alcohol without seeking to change attitudes towards it would likely result in little success. While the Scottish Government’s age-limit plan was ultimately rejected by ministers, a decade on and Scottish policy-making looks set to continue making the elimination of problem drinking rather than the promotion of responsible drinking its starting point. A paper published last November noted that the best way to “change our relationship with alcohol” is to “prevent children and young people from gaining access to alcohol and therefore putting themselves in risky situations” while also stressing that an “alcohol-free childhood is the healthiest and best option”.
READ MORE: Danger of alcohol pricing move
Given this stance there is every reason to believe the Government will act on the proposal to ban alcohol from family events. In a country where over a quarter of adults exceed the recommended intake of alcohol on a weekly basis that may seem like a positive move, but in reality it could prove to be a costly mistake.
Sure, children learn by example, but rather than teaching them that alcohol is something that should be avoided because none of us can be trusted with it, we should be showing them it’s normal to enjoy a couple of beers with friends or a glass of wine with dinner. That some of us are incapable of doing that is a mark of just how unhealthy our relationship with alcohol is, but keeping the booze hidden away is not the way to change that.
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