"Passive drinking" - JS Mill to the rescue?
- From: Brave New Britain <me@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 20:53:38 +0100
EUROPE TO CRACK DOWN ON 'PASSIVE DRINKING', SAYS LEAKED REPORT
Our reporter in Brussels reveals that EC officials are plotting to
make drinking as socially unacceptable as smoking
By Bruno Waterfield
Spiked, UK: 26 May 2006
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/324/
The campaigns to combat the effects of 'passive smoking' are widely
credited for Europe's growing number of smoking bans. Now alcohol is
in the sights of the public health lobbyists, and they have invented
the concept of 'passive drinking' as their killer argument.
I have seen a leaked draft report for the European Commission, which
is due to be published some time in June. It makes claims about the
high environmental or social toll of alcohol, the 'harm done by
someone else's drinking'. The report is likely to inform proposals for
a European Union alcohol strategy later this year.
Dr Peter Anderson, the report's lead author, who has a background in
the World Health Organisation (WHO) and plays a leading role in
Tobacco Free Initiative Europe, tells me that the concept of social
harm takes the alcohol debate beyond the traditional limits of
individual choice and addiction. 'You can make the argument that what
an individual drinks is up to them, provided they understand what they
are doing and bearing in mind that alcohol is a dependency-producing
drug... But when you talk about harm to others then that is a societal
concern and justification for doing something about it. I think that
is an important argument. If there was not harm to others then the
argument gets a little less powerful'.
The draft report doesn't mince its words when it comes to estimating
the social harms of alcohol. 'The total tangible cost of alcohol to EU
society in 2003 was estimated to be Euro125bn (Euro79bn-Euro220bn),
equivalent to 1.3 per cent GDP, and which is roughly the same value as
that found recently for tobacco.' The report further highlights the
broader social cost of drinking, with the proviso that 'these
estimates are subject to a wide margin of error, [and] they are likely
to be an underestimate of the true gross social cost of alcohol'.
'The intangible costs show the value people place on pain, suffering
and lost life that occurs due to the criminal, social and health harms
caused by alcohol', says the report. 'In 2003 these were estimated to
be Euro270bn, with other ways of valuing the same harms producing
estimates between Euro150bn and Euro760bn.'
As Anderson indicates, emphasising the alleged social rather than
individual consequences of alcohol will be key to the new campaign.
The theme of 'passive drinking' was flagged up early on. A Commission
working group on alcohol health met in Luxembourg on 9 June 2004 to
discuss, among other things, early progress on Anderson's report.
Draft minutes note that the participants, EU and national officials
and various experts, were on the hunt for 'main reasons why there is a
need to reduce alcohol-related harm'.
'EU experts agreed that the strategy needed to show more clearly the
facts concerning harm on third parties (both social and health),
including children and other family members of persons with
alcohol-related problems. Experts said that there, for information and
pedagogic reasons, was a need for a good phrase to explain what we
mean by third-party harm in the alcohol field - reference was made to
the phrase "passive smoking".'
Just six days later, the Alcohol Policy Network (APN), a
Commission-funded Eurocare project where Anderson is a staff member,
met in Warsaw. Again, minutes show there was a strong consensus on the
propaganda, or 'advocacy', merits of finding an equivalent term to
'passive smoking' for the alcohol debate. 'The effect of alcohol on
non-drinkers could be used more in advocacy. A need for effective
terminology for this point was identified (eg. "passive drinking"),
and APN members were invited to submit any suggestions they had in
this regard'.
By October 2004, the theme was established in a Eurocare submission to
the Commission. 'Alcohol not only harms the user, but those
surrounding the user, including the unborn child, children, family
members, and the sufferers of crime, violence and drink-driving
accidents: this can be termed environmental alcohol damage or "passive
drinking".'
Dr Peter Anderson now distances himself a little from the term
'passive drinking', while remaining true to the core idea. 'Passive
drinking as a term does not really work. Like you have environmental
tobacco smoke, I suppose you could [talk about] environmental alcohol
damage. I have used that term... but there may be a better way of
doing it', he admits.
In the draft report, the concept is intact. The report claims that as
alcohol consumption, or 'other people's' drinking, increases, so too
does social harm. 'Harms done by someone else's drinking range from
social nuisances such as being kept awake at night through more
serious consequences such as marital harm, child abuse, crime,
violence and homicide. Generally the higher the level of alcohol
consumption, the more serious is the crime or injury.'
Passive or environmental, the figures Anderson has pulled together for
the EU are pretty scary. Drink is responsible for 2,000 homicides,
four out of 10 of Europe's annual murders. 'The economic cost of
alcohol-attributable crime has been estimated to be Euro33bn in the EU
for 2003... while the intangible cost of the physical and
psychological effects of crime has been valued at Euro9bn - Euro37bn.'
Children, too, are passive victims of drinking. 'Many of the harms
caused by alcohol are borne by people other than the drinker
responsible. This includes 60,000 underweight births, as well as 16
per cent of child abuse and neglect, and five to nine million children
in families adversely affected by alcohol', says the report's summary.
But while arguments have raged over a causal relationship between
alcohol and crime since the nineteenth century, evidence for a
connection has remained thin. 'Questions of how alcohol exerts its
criminogenic influence have never been satisfactorily answered... [all
that can be concluded is] alcohol does not directly cause crime but
that it may be implicated indirectly', argues a study cited in the
Oxford Handbook of Criminology.
The link made by campaigners between alcohol and crime today, whether
violence or child abuse, follows not from hard facts but from a
subjective outlook that sees human characteristics as damaging in
general. And if human beings, particularly when under the influence of
stimulants, are destructive, then, the argument goes, social
intervention must follow. The idea that almost any activity -
drinking, eating, speaking, even thinking - can cause harm is often
blown out of proportion and used to generate frightening figures and
policies.
Most violent crimes are committed by men; should males therefore be
subject to special restrictive laws? Domestic violence mostly takes
place in private homes; should privacy be abolished? Claiming that
aspects of everyday life, such as drinking, automatically leads to
'harm' takes away from the responsibility of individual lawbreakers
for what they have done, and thus makes for bad policy. Should all 85
per cent of Europe's citizens who drink - that's at least 387 million
of us - face restrictions because of the tiny minority who commit the
2,000 homicides dubiously attributed to alcohol?
In a twist of irony probably lost on po-faced public health types, the
expression 'passive drinking' seems to have originated as a spoof in
two 'Peter Simple' columns in the UK Daily Telegraph in 2002 and 2003,
written by journalist Michael Wharton. Mocking the rise of nonsense
research to justify social measures, he wrote about research work
being carried out by 'Dr Ron Hardware' at 'Nerdley University'. 'They
were the first to discover the scourge of "passive drinking", showing
by painstaking experiments and finely adjusted statistics that it was
just as deadly as "passive smoking" and equally capable of causing
cancer and innumerable other ills'.
Also, Soldier, 'magazine of the British Army', generated some shock
and awe with a prescient April's Fool story in 2006, about a looming
booze ban to counter passive drinking. 'This is another big brother
idea taking in the problems of the minority and laying it squarely on
the shoulders of the majority', wrote one outraged serviceman who
didn't spot the joke. Today, it's no longer a joke - European
officials are plotting to make 'passive drinking' a reality.
Many of the ideas behind the latest European attempts to demonise
drinking have much older, hoary antecedents. Some of the arguments and
organisations involved go back to 1853. The Commission tender for the
report went to the British Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS), an
organisation with close links to Alliance House, venerable temperance
campaigners. This relationship has already raised some eyebrows. It
epitomises the convergence between public health campaigners and
old-style moralistic prohibitionists. Alliance House was founded in
1853 by Quaker cotton manufacturer Nathaniel Card to work for the
prohibition of alcohol. Inspired by prohibition in the US, his
campaign soon gathered momentum and the Alliance became a political
force to be reckoned with. But, thankfully for us today, Card and his
friends were critiqued by John Stuart Mill and other progressive
humanists.
In 1857 - the year that Mill's classic essay On Liberty was published
- the Alliance was not seeking outright prohibition of alcohol but
rather was trying to establish key arguments about the social harm of
drinking. Today's campaigners use strikingly similar tactics.
Anderson's arguments on social harm are similar to those used by the
Alliance 150 years ago. 'If anything invades my social rights,
certainly the traffic in strong drink does', wrote the secretary of
the Alliance, as quoted by Mill. 'It destroys my primary right of
security by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder... It
impedes my moral and intellectual development, by surrounding my path
with dangers.'
Mill took issue with the idea that drinking was a social act rather
than simply a trade in alcohol. He did back limited restrictions so
long as they didn't have an intended prohibitive effect on
individuals. He classed drinking as an individual act, for right or
wrong, along with religion, opinion or conscience and other
'experiments in living', which should be 'outside' the scope of the
law. The individual act of having a drink is not the cause of crime,
believed Mill, any more than parenthood is the cause of child abuse or
holding an opinion is a breach of someone's 'social rights'.
Mill was keenly aware of the dangers of linking spiralling social
harms with individual behaviour. 'So monstrance a principle is far
more dangerous than any single interference with liberty', he wrote.
'There is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it
acknowledges no right to any freedom whatsoever, except perhaps that
of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for the
moment an opinion which I consider noxious passes anyone's lips, it
invades all the "social rights" attributed to me by the Alliance.'
Anderson's report and a future EU strategy will be relatively light on
legislation - but, as Mill argues, the principle is more important
than any particular act of law.
If the Anderson report is anything to go by, the EU looks set to
propose shorter bar opening hours, days when shops cannot sell
alcohol, health warnings, and higher taxes to put off drinkers across
Europe. Here, too, Mill would disagree, because the restrictions
spring from the above 'monstrous principle' with the avowed intent of
cutting individual consumption. He backed licensing laws but only as a
means of regulating or taxing public sale of alcohol, not as a means
of checking individual acts of drinking.
'The limitation of number, for instance, of beer and spirit houses,
for the express purpose of rendering them more difficult of access,
and diminishing the occasions of temptation, not only exposes all to
an inconvenience because there are some by whom the facility might be
abused, but is suited only to a state of society in which the
labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages, and
placed under a education of restraint, to fit them for future
admission to freedom... No person who sets due value on freedom will
give his adhesion to being so governed', Mill argued.
Today's public health campaigners may not specifically target the
working classes (instead we're all in their sights), but they also,
like the old prohibitionists, have little faith in the capacity of
people to run their own lives without being instructed by propaganda
or tutored in scare stories. The European report says: 'Educational
interventions, which show little effectiveness in reducing the harm
done by alcohol, are not an alternative to measures that regulate the
alcohol market, which have the greatest impact in reducing harm...
Educational programmes should not be implemented in isolation as an
alcohol policy measure... but rather as a measure to reinforce
awareness of the problems created by alcohol and to prepare the ground
for specific interventions and policy changes... Broad educational
programmes, beginning in early childhood, should be implemented to
inform young people of the consequences of alcohol consumption on
health, family and society and of the effective measures that can be
taken to prevent or minimise harm.'
There is perhaps one key difference between yesterday's and today's
'prohibition campaigners'. Once the temperance movement believed man
could be saved. Today, it joins with the public health lobby to treat
drinking as a form of social pathology rather than a question of moral
redemption. Once, public health had the aim of protecting society
against disease. Today, the 'new public health movement' seeks to
protect society against people themselves.
Today's public health outlook on drinking dovetails neatly with other
powerful contemporary trends that emphasise human vulnerability or
undermine trust between individuals. Linking drinking to free-floating
risks, independent of the intentions of individuals, is a
characteristic of today's anti-humanist climate. But 200 years after
his birth, we can take heart from the works and legacy of Mill. He
stood against the tide in his day and won. We owe him a debt and we
owe the future of freedom a duty to make our own stand against the new
public health alliance of the twenty-first century.
.
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