I’ve drunk more alcohol than is good for me all my life. Deep down, I knew it couldn’t be doing me much good, but I kept my lips to the glass and my head in the sand and ploughed right on. Mea culpa.
In the course of making a documentary called Drinkers Like Me last year, I found out just how much I was putting away, and what harm I’d done myself. My liver, to my horror, turned out not to be in good shape. And my intake is almost certainly a factor in my trio of other middle-aged maladies: hypertension, reflux and anxiety/depression.
Naturally enough, I look around for someone to blame other than myself, without much joy. But I have come to see that the alcohol producers really aren’t being as straight as they could be. I still enjoy a drink and, although I have moderated, I probably still put away more than the recommended safe maximum of 14 units a week. I’m not some nascent prohibitionist, by any stretch. People should be able to drink what they like, but they should do so with complete information. And that’s something the industry seems intent on keeping from us.
Consider a pub, with its long row of beer taps. On some you will see the percentage of alcohol in the beer. But why doesn’t it tell you how many units of alcohol there are in a pint? For that matter, why doesn’t it also tell you how many calories there are? After all, if you buy a bag of crisps for the beer to wash down, it has to have full nutritional information clearly marked on it.
It turns out there is actually an exemption for alcohol products. If it’s got alcohol in it, then there’s no need to have the nutritional information on there. Therefore while there has to be clear information on soft drinks, there doesn’t on alcoholic drinks. No, me neither.
In 2016 our chief medical officers set the safe drinking guidelines at a new lower level – 14 units a week for both men and women. Three years later, on the vast majority of products we looked at for Panorama, most producers still aren’t seeing fit to mention this. Small wonder that fewer than one in five of us are aware of the crucial 14-unit figure, as it’s on hardly any packaging at all. In most cases, the old advice – 28 units for men and 21 for women – is all you’ll get.
As for the 14-unit weekly safe drinking guidance, for what it’s worth – unlike many in the alcohol business – I choose to believe the conclusions of countless studies by scientists all over the world. If that’s your long-term weekly intake, you have a 1-in-100 chance of dying from an alcohol-related illness. More than that and the odds get shorter. Regular drinkers everywhere scoff disbelievingly at these 14 miserable units. I used to myself, until I found out that more than 70% of all drinkers do indeed drink at that low level, and good on them.
However, this astonishing truth does have an unintended consequence: most of the industry’s profits have to come from the other 30% of us. We need to keep pretty hard at it for them. If we were all to drop our drinking to safe levels, those profits would be hit to the tune of well over £10bn.
I asked John Timothy, chief executive of the Portman Group, the industry-funded body formed to “foster a balanced understanding of alcohol-related issues”, if the businesses he represents would be comfortable with losing profits. “Yes, demonstrably so. My members, alcohol producers, don’t benefit from people who misuse alcohol,” he said.
Whether their shareholders are as relaxed at the prospect of falling profits is another question.
The government betrays no appetite to regulate the industry. The secretary of state for health, Matt Hancock, declined to appear on our programme. He has said this year that he’s “dead against” minimum unit pricing. For that reason England will soon be the only part of the country where someone with serious alcohol issues will be able to buy three litres of super-strong cider for less than four pounds.
With alcohol-related deaths at a 20-year high, liver specialists are in despair. As eminent hepatologist Nick Sheron puts it: “I’ve been in this game for about 20 years. I’ve been trying to stop people dying of liver disease by changing alcohol policy, and if I’d thought 20 years ago that this is where we were I just would have been so depressed. We’re just not winning. The drinks industry are winning because the government spends more time listening to the drinks industry than they do listening to doctors and the chief medical officer.”
One of the industry’s arguments against minimum pricing is that moderate drinkers would be penalised. But as long as the minimum price is set at 50p – as it is in Scotland – you’re still going to get a bottle of wine for £4.50 or a bottle of whisky for £14. If you’re only drinking moderately, that’s not going to hit you too hard.
The alcohol companies need to chill out. We’ll all be drinking quite enough to keep them ticking over for a good while yet. So they might as well start being honest about some of the numbers to get the likes of me off their backs.
BBC Panorama: Britain’s Drink Problem is on BBC One on Monday 10 June at 8.30pm.
