Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health

by David J. Nutt

What you can see is that death rates from (almost) every disorder have gone down since 1970. This is what you’d expect, as medicine improves and society becomes generally healthier due to public health measures. In fact, most disease rates have halved over the 40-year period. But as you can also see, deaths from liver diseases (80 per cent of which are caused by alcohol) have increased fivefold. Successive governments have had access to this data. I can only assume they all decided not to take any steps to cut the rate of liver disease because they didn’t want to stand up to the drinks industry. Instead, what they did or didn’t do compounded the problem. Firstly, they didn’t ensure alcohol prices kept pace with income because they refused to raise duty enough or introduce minimum pricing. In real terms, alcohol now costs a third of what it did in 1970. Secondly, they liberalised access to alcohol by allowing sales in supermarkets and by lengthening licensing hours. The upshot was, over those 40 years, the average per-head consumption of alcohol increased by about 50 per cent. But because of the exponential relation between consumption and liver damage, the number of deaths multiplied by 400 per cent.