Please Drink Responsibly, Because We Will Do As We Please

When a history of advertising in the 21st Century eventually comes to be written, special mention should be given to the alcohol industry's appropriation of the word 'responsible', and the hidden ideology that goes with it. In cinema adverts, full page features in newspapers and the sponsorship of popular TV shows, we are gently reminded to drink alcohol responsibly, whilst being bombarded with powerful alluring images of the good times it supposedly brings. The critic Roland Barthes argued that an object is mythologised when the politics and history attached to it is replaced with a sense of 'naturalness'; the word responsibility has surely become the alcohol industry's great mythologising tool. The subtle subtext, always unspoken, but by implication unmistakably there, is that once the product is purchased, the responsibility lies completely with the consumer, and that the alcohol content, pricing, promotion, advertising and packaging are not factors in the equation worthy of considering. It is if these elements of the discussion have been erased completely, and the drinker must now live up to society's expectations and try to behave. No one, of course, would advocate anything less, we all have a personal responsibility to act in a law abiding manner and be sociable to our neighbours, but the trick with responsibility is to shunt any of the burden of it off the shoulders of the alcohol industry and retailers. There is a sound reason for this as well, when seen from the point of view of the industry; Alcohol sales are worth billions in the UK, but the actual cost to society, the massive, massive clean up job that we have to take 'responsibility' for, comes to the princely sum of £21 billion a year. These eye watering figures are something that the alcohol industry is working very hard not to have to be associated with, the subtext to their insincere pleas for moderation make more sense in the light of these kinds of sums; they are less a plea for sanity in a world gone mad with alcohol, and more a disclaimer - 'we've asked people to drink sensibly, and if they don't it's hardly our fault is it?' Alcohol retailers and manufacturers are only showing the most cursory signs that they are willing to make and sell this powerful addictive drug more responsibly. Heineken, embarrassed by the cider brand White Lightning stopped producing it last year, and Tesco and Co-op in Ipswich, with the backing of local police, have ended the sale of super strength lagers. All of this is to be commended, but it is a tiny step along a road to recovery for Britain during a time which more and more shocking revelations are coming to light. In a recent article in the Independent newspaper Jeremy Swain, Chief Executive of Thameslink, a leading homelessness charity, said that his charity's clients were harmed more by super strength lager than by heroin and crack cocaine. He said: "We are not talking about people dying at 68 or 69. We are talking about people dying in their late 30s," highlighting the absurdity that one can of 9 per cent Carlsberg Special Brew contained 4.5 units, whereas the recommended daily intake for a man is 4 units. Buy one can of super strength lager, and automatically, you aren't drinking responsibly, but what of the brewer? How, in the face of such facts, can Carlsberg or any other producer of such dangerous products preach responsibility towards the consumer, when they have acted in such a reckless manner, if not causing then certainly facilitating untold misery? They manage to do it through another term that is worth its weight in advertising and marketing gold: choice. Equip consumers with enough choice and they can make their own minds up without being patronised by governments, doctors and do gooders, choice was a preferred phrase of the smoking lobby until recently too. Choice will only be a term that can be meaningfully applied when people are made aware on the packaging of beers wines and spirits that they are buying a powerful addictive drug that has been aggressively marketed at them, that it is an aggravating factor in the vast majority of violent crimes, features in most of the NSPCC's recorded cases of child abuse, and as latest figures suggest, causes an additional 22,000 deaths per year.