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Sad day for drinkers, (In Scotland).
Unit prices come in tomorrow to try and save our souls from the demon drink, everybody knows what the mental drinks are, Bucky and the like, but a lot of them are not affected , I am partial to a wee Vodka so the minimum price is going to be £14 a bottle and nearly £19 a litre, shops are being fly already, holding back drink they have bought at the cheaper price, and even types of drink thats not affected have gone up in price, we will be going back to the days of the dodgy spirits made with all sorts of ****, if this waste of space for a government were serious they would have priced it a lot more on drinks that they know the dafties drink, 50p will not make a difference, so who gets the profits ?, the health service or the supermarkets ?, anywho time for a dram, cheers.
Comments
If you increase the prices to the point where they can't afford it, they'll just steal alcohol, steal the money for alcohol, or cut back on necessities. You're not tackling the problem by introducing this IMO, you're replacing it with a different problem that is still going to cost the taxpayer money to resolve, while still failing to address the root of the problem.
I've never heard a drug addict say "My dealer put his cocaine price up to 40 quid a gram so I'm going to be a responsible addict and only buy 3 grams instead of 4".
Alcoholism is a coping mechanism, not a choice - A better place to start IMO would be by tackling issues such as poverty, unemployment and homelessness in Scotland. Removing people from situations where they're going to find themselves more likely to end up becoming alcoholics in the future is the best way to reduce alcohol related deaths. This is the effect it will have anyway. Most drinks are going to be above 50p/unit, except for the big 2-3L bottles of cheap cider, own brand spirits, that kind of thing. And that is exactly what these people drink. You're going to see all of those drinks disappear off the shelves.
There's several issues with the 50p/unit price chosen though IMO: Firstly, it means you're not increasing the price for people who can afford decent quality alcohol. Any £££ from this needs to go into preventing alcohol abuse in the future by tackling issues mentioned above.
For this to be effective, they would have to (IMO) charge more, probably closer to 60-65p/unit so that the people who can afford to buy alcohol are also affected significantly by the price increase. You can then use the extra tax money that those people will generate to put into lowering unemployment/homelessness/poverty and tackle alcoholism in poorer groups within society, too.
An increase to 60-65p would also be significant enough that it would encourage more people to go to the pub and pay £3 a pint rather than staying at home, as pub prices won't be affected by the minimum price. That way, you have people putting more money into local businesses who can afford to do so, which is obvs a good thing.
That said, with any minimum price, all that's going to happen is that alcoholics will drink something else. The change should wipe out all the cheap alcohol options in the short term as they won't be able to compete on price any more and they'll never compete on quality, but all that's going to happen is people end up buying whichever drink is on special offer at 50p/unit.
I think you'll see a lot of offers like "Buy some cheap **** (Like big bottle of cider or something) at 50p/unit and we'll also sell you some of this decent stuff at a reduced price of 50p/unit". Person then sells the decent quality alcohol to a friend for a profit, thus circumventing the minimum unit price on the remaining drinks.
Worse still, if all drinks are a minimum price per unit, you're going to have people who were previously drinking poor quality cheap lager suddenly buying spirits because they all cost the same now. I would not be at all surprised to see a higher death rate due to alcohol for the next year because alcoholics are suddenly buying way more spirits, with legislation eventually coming in to force a massive price bump on spirits.
tl;dr version - I'm not convinced that a minimum price is the right thing as it fails to address the root of the problem, but if you're going to have a minimum price then I think 50p is too low to see enough of a financial benefit for reinvestment into the social issues that often lead to alcoholism.
tennents lager up to £18 for 20 cans from £15 , one of the worst tasting lagers out there so not bothered with that one either.
its time to make the moonshine!