Alcohol and drugs

One of the big holes in the logic of the current drugs policy is that somehow alcohol isn’t a drug. This is something this blog has moaned about before – the very existence of “Drug and Alcohol Action Teams” underlines this officially held distinction, as the Cambridgeshire DAAT website states on it’s “about” page (our bold):

The DAAT is the strategic body through which the local drug strategy and Alcohol Strategy are decided and actioned.

This blog isn’t picking on Cambridgeshire’s DAAT for any reason incidentally, it’s typical of them all and just happened to be the first one Google came up with. The drug and alcohol strategies are indeed different, very different. Drugs, of course, are illegal things that wreck communities whereas alcohol is the acceptable social lubricant normal people use which a few sadly have trouble with.

Now, talking of “both”categories brings to mind the sequence from the Blues Brothers film where the bar owner says “Oh yeah, we have both types of music, Country AND Western”. Each type of drug is different and it makes no real sense to talk about cannabis and heroin as being similar any more than it makes talking of alcohol and cannabis, other than in how to control, regulate and limit the trade and it’s in this specific area that the strategy for alcohol is so very different to that applied to all the rest.

Alcohol is a recreational drug, lets be quite clear about this and what applies to cannabis in terms of policy should surely apply to alcohol. Of course, that isn’t the situation because a purely arbitrary decision has been made to class cannabis as an illegal drug and alcohol as, well, something else. The trouble with all this is that we now have two extremes of policy which has produced the worst of all worlds. Cannabis the uncontrolled illegal drug, sold by an unregulated but massively profitable underground trade and alcohol the driver of the night time economy supplied by big business which regulates itself.

Now there have been many proposals for cannabis law reform over the years, everything really from what we used to call “The cabbage model” of unrestricted  market gardening with cannabis being sold alongside the cabbages (hence the name) through to tightly restricted distribution through pharmacies with the coffeeshop ideal somewhere between the two. But whereas the regime applied to alcohol in respect of age limits, licenced premises and so on has generally been accepted no-one to my knowledge has ever called for its full commercialisation, complete with branding and big business advertising bucks.

Alcohol isn’t just a legal recreational drug, it’s big business. Every year the brewers spend a mind blowing £180 million on advertising (Guardian)

In the year to the end of June, £72m was spent on TV ads by alcohol companies, £46.5m ploughed into newspapers and magazines, £28m went on outdoor billboards and posters, £14m on cinema ads and £4.5m on radio. A further £15m was spent on direct mail, according to figures from Nielsen, which does not have figures for online advertising.

The total annual cost to the advertiser-funded UK media industry of a complete ban on alcohol marketing and advertising, as proposed by the British Medical Association today, would be £180m, Nielsen said.

There is only one reason the brewers spend this sort of money, because doing so makes for bigger profits. It makes for bigger profits because more people drink more alcohol as a result. It beggers belief that the brewers attempt to deny this by claiming – just as the cigarette industry did before the ban on tobacco advertising – that it’s all about brand loyalty.

To use official drugs speak in the context of booze, advertising is akin to “pushing” – encouraging people who otherwise would have passed your product by to indulge.

Now when the government is approached about the harm caused by different drugs, they are always keen to highlight the massively higher rates of use of alcohol  compared to illegal drugs and they are usually keen to attribute this higher rate of use to the deterrent effect of the prohibition law, choosing to ignore all the studies which show little of no correlation between degree of repression and rates of use. The elephant in the room is the commercialisation allowed over legal alcohol. If cannabis were legalised and allowed to be promoted with advertising budgets to match this, would it be reasonable to expect use to rise or not? That frankly seems a daft question, because of course it is a daft question.

There is, in fact, no reason why this pushing – sorry advertising – should be allowed and some very good reasons why it shouldn’t. So it was with interest  that the British Medical Association (BMA) this week called for a ban on alcohol advertising:

Doctors call time on alcohol promotion
(issued Tuesday 08 Sep 2009)

In a bid to tackle the soaring cost of alcohol-related harm, particularly in young people, the BMA is calling for a total ban on alcohol advertising, including sports events and music festival sponsorship. In addition, the BMA is calling for an end to all promotional deals like happy hours, two-for-one purchases and ladies’ free entry nights.

What would happen if this came to pass? Well, people would still drink but habits would certainly change. For a start the type of drinks would change from being those promoted by image marketing firms to those recommended by other drinkers. It would probably lead to a vastly increased range of products on offer as smaller companies would find it easier to compete, not having to face the demand created by advertising. It would also probably mean the end of the big brewers as well, their position having been created by the marketing men in the first place.

It would certainly lead to a reduction in the number of people who drank and the amount they drank, although whether it would lead to a reduction in the number of problem drinkers is less certain, indeed it probably wouldn’t, just as hardline prohibition failed to do that.

But at the heart of this is the question of how we want to see drugs managed in the future. We do not simply face a choice of two options; of prohibition or full on free market commercialisation, there are other regimes and in general, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. A legal, licenced, properly regulated trade free from commercial promotion is surely the way to go. This would allow those who want drugs to get them safely and to use them as safely as possible, whereas it wouldn’t be promoted as a lifestyle accessory.

We need to end this daft idea of “drugs and alcohol” and come up with a regime which can cater for the whole range of intoxicating substances out there. A ban on alcohol advertising would be a step in the right direction.