A high street weapon of mass destruction

A high street weapon of mass destruction. That the country is in the grip of an epidemic of alcoholism has long been understood by most health professionals. Almost every index relating to drinking show a steep rise in consumption and an equivalent rise in alcohol related illnesses, violence and death. The one million assaults in the UK every year and the involvement of alcohol as an aggravating factor in most recorded cases of child abuse are such large statistical abstractions that it makes it difficult for the mind to take in the scale of the carnage caused by Britain's soft touch approach to this drug. A particular court case this week however, might help to focus the thoughts as it involves a crime of horrendous and senseless violence, one fuelled by alcohol, but one where alcohol's involvement was at no point questioned challenged or condemned. Carl Mills yesterday began a life sentence with a minimum term of 30 years for murder after deliberately setting fire to a house, killing his estranged girlfriend Kayleigh Buckley along with their daughter Kimberley and her mother Kim. His relationship with alcohol was well documented, Torfaen social services were concerned about his heavy drinking, but little more was said about it than that. A spokesperson for the Crown Prosecution Service said: "Carl Mills was responsible for starting a devastating fire that had distressing and tragic consequences. He did so knowing full well who was in the house at the time – and the evidence of his jealous and controlling nature makes it all too clear what his intentions were." That he was completely responsible for the crime and a cruel and sadistic man is beyond doubt, but the other silent accomplice, the alcohol industry yesterday slunk away largely unnoticed, its involvement in the crime going unquestioned in court and in all other arenas of public debate; the media and the government said nothing about the role of alcohol in the crime, even though social services reports had strongly hinted towards it being a key factor in Mills' violence. British society operates in many ways like a family riven with dysfunction caused by addiction, in both instances everyone secretly knows the truth, but the unspoken rules that are all pervading prohibit all of us from speaking it. If we explore some statistics and focus on some uncomfortable truths, however, we may be able to break this toxic silence. Alcohol, globally, is a weapon of mass destruction. How can we say this with any conviction? Landmines, costing anything between $3 and $10 to buy and now some 120 million in number, kill, worldwide some 800 people per month, the majority of whom are children and almost all of whom are poor. Alcohol kills just under 210,000 worldwide per month according to the World Health Organisation, some staggering 2.5 million people per year (when next year we take stock of the millions killed from 1914-1918, it might be interesting to revisit this statistic and contextualise it, a different kind of carnage for our time but no less deadly). Another way of thinking about it is this: alcohol will kill, in the next twelve months, roughly 25 times as many people as the conflict in Syria has currently claimed. It will kill, in the next decade, roughly as many Russians as were lost in the Second World War, and in the next year kill six times as many people as the Ethiopian famine in 1984. All the dictators we revile, the famines that shock us when we watch the Six O'clock News, all the tsunamis and earthquakes and civil wars that cut a bloody swathe through mankind, all of these have a tough time competing with alcohol for sheer destructive power. Britain, mercifully, has none of the above horrors to contend with, but it does have one of the most acute alcohol problems in the developed world. With this in mind the decision this week, the same week that Mills was convicted, by Prime Minister David Cameron to backtrack from minimum pricing legislation was one of the greatest abandonments of the British public to the interests of private profit in modern political history. Peer reviewed and evidence led research has clearly demonstrated in a number of cases that the level of injury, illness and premature deaths fell with even modest increases in minimum pricing, indicating that poor, vulnerable drinkers already drinking excessively were unable to consume the levels of drink that they had previously been able to. The various faux-libertarian arguments that have sprung forth over this issue repeatedly emphasise that the government has no right to rob the working man of what little pleasure he has in life, i.e. a cheap drink, and that good sensible drinkers should not have to be penalised because of a handful of bad apples. Firstly, as an addictive substance that is catastrophically damaging to the social fabric of the nation, is linked to a million assaults in the UK each year and costs the taxpayer annually some £12 billion, alcohol absolutely should be the subject of strict pricing, all other measures to limit its consumption have failed, including farcical attempts to involve the industry in 'self-regulation'. Secondly, if the drinkers who feel persecuted by the threat of a marginally more expensive pint of beer or glass of wine haven't got problems with alcohol, what actually is the problem? A few pence on the price of a drink is surely a small price to pay to curb the death-toll caused by drinking. The objections, no doubt, come primarily from the alcohol industry itself and from powerful and invisible lobbyists who have access to the Prime Minister and the rest of the political class (a U-turn this week on plain cigarette packaging and the convenient presence of tobacco lobbyist Lynton Crosby in the PM's inner circle gives us a clue as to how the rest of the government's 'health' policy works). It was perhaps too much to hope that our government, hopelessly in thrall to private concerns, was going to take a brave, necessary and potentially unpopular stand on alcohol and show real leadership. The game of modern politics may once have been about making harsh, necessary decisions (Cameron and Osborne seem adept at doing this when it comes to slashing state spending) but now it is far more a struggle for popularity over policy. Every time there is a car crash, a stabbing, a mugging or a rape, or every time a family of three is murdered in their beds by a young man sick with the disease of alcoholism and with endless cheap booze to feed it, think of the Prime Minister. Think of him and of an entirely superficial, glib and unconvincing political class, owned by big business concerns whose only interest is in privatising the proceeds of their weapon of mass destruction, and socialising the costs to the rest of us.