There has been so much hype surrounding alcohol and the dangers of its consumption lately in the news with six leading health organisations refusing to sign up to the governments new “responsibility deal in England”. The full details of the deal have not been unveiled yet but there has been some speculation on what changes it may entail for the alcohol industry. Among these assumptions is the rise of the cost of alcohol, taking cheap alcohol off the shelves, putting health warnings on bottles and more education on the effects of alcohol given to schools.
Health professionals say this will only promote alcohol and increase the problem, but studies show these sorts of measures have worked in other countries such as France. But will these measures stop alcohol abuse here in the UK?
According to the NHS website ‘Student life can seem to revolve around alcohol, with the student bar and local pubs often the centre of the college social scene’ so, who better to test this theory on than you? I spoke to a number of students around the UK as well as a detention officer, who deals with alcohol abuse daily and got similar responses from each of them.
Four out of five students don’t know the recommended safe limits of alcohol. This is 21 units of alcohol a week for men but no more that 4 units in a single day, and 14 units of alcohol a week for women but no more than 3 units in a single day. Many of you guys didn’t even know how much a unit of alcohol was and so couldn’t give a rough guide of how much you drink a week. Basically a unit is 10ml of pure alcohol or one unit per shot. There are roughly 9 units in a bottle of 12% wine and 3 units in a pint of premium strength lager. Another way to calculate how many units are in a drink is the percentage is the amount of units in a litre, so a 6% beer will have 6 units per litre, two pints go in to a litre which makes a pint 3 units.
Despite the lack of knowledge we students have on our alcohol units the majority of people that are taken in to a detention sell overnight for alcohol abuse are in their late twenties to early thirties. “There is no point in educating the people who come in to prisons for being drunk, most of them are well aware of the risks and don’t care. I see the same faces day in and day out” a detention officer told me.
Most students don’t class themselves as binge drinkers but social drinkers instead, and don’t feel that their drinking has become a problem. The price of alcohol wouldn’t make a difference to their drinking habits at all and if the price increased even more it wouldn’t stop them from going out and having a drink. “The problem with this idea is that the people I have to deal with don’t care about the cost most of them are alcoholics and steal the alcohol, they will get it anyway they can” the source said. It seems that this part of the governments ‘responsibility deal’ won’t help to stop drinking either.
The other hypothesis, that the government plan to put safety warnings on bottles, also had no effect on the interviewed students. Most said it would be annoying but wouldn’t stop them from drinking. They all said that they are aware of the dangers of alcohol already and it doesn’t affect how much they drink and neither will a health label. Many brought up the safety warnings on cigarette packets and said that didn’t stop them from smoking but the overexposure to health warnings desensitised them to the problems they can cause.
“It's frustrating for us detention officers” my source told me “you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, everyone is offered treatment but 90% of the time they don’t want it. Our jobs are put on the line every time someone comes in intoxicated it is the highest risk of death in a custody sweet, and still people continue to do the same thing”.
All in all it is understandable that the health organisations did not sign the ‘responsibility deal’ as it seems that it is giving alcohol more publicity and the deterrents will not work.
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