The Giant of Excess

Attacking last week's Foresight report that claimed individuals could no longer be held responsible for obesity, a leading Government adviser, Professor Julian Le Grand, argues that a completely fresh approach is needed to reverse problems caused by the "excess consumption" of tobacco, of food, of alcohol, of illegal drugs, and of indoor leisure. Suggesting that the new "giant of excess" has arisen alongside the "five giants" identified by William Beveridge when he founded the welfare state — namely, those of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness — Le Grand says that instead of requiring individuals to opt in to healthy schemes, they should have to opt out to make the unhealthy choice, for instance by being required to buy a smoking permit before being able to purchase cigarettes.

Such "libertarian paternalism" is certainly not as extreme as prohibition, yet it still smacks of Labour's nanny state, so is perhaps not quite as radical as the professor would have us believe. For instance, when I go to work, I do so to work. I would not want my company to be required to designate an hour in the working day as the "exercise hour" — I would rather continue exercising with my family out of work hours. Equally, requiring supermarkets to sell alcohol separately from groceries or restricting the sale of alcohol to off licences would simply inconvenience and annoy customers, not change their drinking habits. As for the idea of the Health Secretary sending parents details of their children's weight measurements at the ages of five and ten, I can not think this is going to make any difference to any family's eating and exercise habits.

What Le Grand's analysis misses is that the state itself has become our biggest giant to be tackled. A truly "completely fresh approach" would involve the Government meddling less and trusting people more. It would require the Government rediscovering for which areas it properly exists and returning responsibility for those in which it should never have made society irresponsible. Only then might we begin having an impact on the symptoms of our broken society.

Alternative to Misuse of Drugs

Yesterday's controversial proposals to legalise all drugs, made in the thirty page report "Drugs Policy: A Radical Look Ahead?" by the chief constable of North Wales, Richard Brunstrom, have today received further support from a former chief inspector of prisons, Lord Ramsbotham: "I used to reckon that 80 per cent of those people received into prison were misusing a substance of some kind when they came in. The amount of acquisitive crime connected to drug abuse is immense. That is why there needs to be a new approach."

Of course, they are not alone in claiming that drugs policy has been based on "moralistic political rhetoric" rather than evidence. Earlier this year the independent UK Drug Policy Commission reported that both government education schemes and treatment of addicts have had little impact, while the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) suggested that UK drug law had been "driven by moral panic" and was "not fit for purpose." Indeed, the chief constable even quotes John Reid as acknowledging that "prohibition doesn't work" and the Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, as conceding "it drives the activity underground."

Nevertheless, the Government and the likes of Ken Jones, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, have predictably dismissed the proposals. Yet, in calling for the repeal of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, Mr Brunstrom is not calling for an "anarchic free-for-all," as some reports seem to suggest. Instead, he proposes replacing the current ABC classification for drugs with a new, scientifically-based "Hierarchy of Harm" including tobacco and alcohol, and decoupled from criminal penalties:

"Drugs and psychotropic substances are simply not going to go away as if by magic. And so, if drugs cannot be eradicated (and the evidence that they cannot is now overwhelming), then the principal object of public policy should be to reduce as far as possible the great harms that they can and do cause."

This is precisely the same as the index of harms classification system for drugs proposed by the Commons Science Select Committee last year and supported by the RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs, Communities and Public Policy when it recommended replacing the Misuse of Drugs Act with a broader Misuse of Substances Act earlier this year. When we read statistics such as that the cost of alcohol and tobacco to the NHS in England is double that of all illegal drugs and that in Scotland in 2004, tobacco killed about 13,000 people and alcohol 2,052, while just 356 died from all other illegal drugs put together, Brunstrom is surely right to dismiss the ABC system as "indefensible, both legally and ethically" and "arbitrary, and subject to politically-motivated manipulation" and to call for a national debate on the issue, isn't he?

Labour's Alcopops Addicts

Take a good look at the picture below comparing a normal liver with one destroyed by cirrhosis and then read the latest figures from the British Liver Trust on how serious our under-age drinking problem has become in the last five years:

Between 2001 and 2006 unit consumption for 11-13 year olds who drank alcohol had risen by nearly one hundred percent from 5.6 units to 10.1 units in a one week period.

A report published today by The Information Centre highlights the need for a change in behaviour from young people with one in five pupils aged 11-15 years admitting to being drunk in the last four weeks of the study and around a third of these pupils had deliberately tried to get drunk.

This follows news earlier in the year that the number of hospital admissions involving teenagers with alcohol-related diseases caused by "acute intoxication" has almost doubled over the past four years, including three children under the age of 18 who were treated for alcohol-related liver cirrhosis, a disease that usually takes five to ten years of heavy drinking to develop.

So much for Labour's approach to alcohol...

End of Happy Hour?

"Alcohol is too cheap and too readily available and is too strong. Young people cannot handle it."

Really? Cheshire's chief constable, Peter Fahy, clearly thinks so. Certainly Labour's extension of licensing hours appears to have sent as clear a signal on binge drinking as their declassification of cannabis did on drugs. But would raising the legal drinking age to 21 have any impact on the country's underlying social problems? What do you reckon?

Sex, Drugs But No Power

Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll — The 1960s is the decade most people would most like to live in. Now, it seems, today's "youf" are trying to re-create that bygone utopia of sexual and social liberalisation, but I have to wonder whether they have not forgotten one crucial ingredient: flower power.

The Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV (IAG) says there is an indisputable link between alcohol, drugs and risky sexual behaviour, describing the threat as fuel for a sexual health crisis. Given the failure of the Government's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, drug policy, and approach to teenage binge drinkers, this should come no surprise.

Noting that sexual health in the UK has been deteriorating over the last twelve years, the group warns that young people are starting to have sexual intercourse at a younger age, are becoming more promiscuous in their behaviour, and have the highest rate of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies in Europe. Their report asks, "As adults, are we reneging on our responsibilities?"

Rather than answer what seems a blindingly simple question with a blatantly obvious answer, I want to turn the query around: Are today's youth reneging on their responsibilities? If they've rediscovered the sex (earlier and riskier) and the drugs (stronger and more dangerous), why haven't they stumbled onto rock'n'roll? They've got their Vietnam (Iraq), so where are the non-violent anti-war protests? They've got their nuclear causes (renewal of Trident and next generation of power stations), so where are the sit-down demonstrations? They've got their gun crime and armed police, so why is nobody giving flowers to policemen?

The IAG claims "young people do not engage in risky behaviour: they experiment and explore" but I'm not convinced ... It seems to me that Generation Blair has missed the point.

Teenage Binge Drinkers

On the back of figures suggesting that 11 to 13-year-olds are drinking increasing amounts of alcohol, the charity Alcohol Concern last week called for parents who give alcohol to children aged under 15 to be prosecuted.

Thanks to researchers at the Liverpool John Moores University's public health centre, who carried out a survey of more than 10,000 children in over 130 schools in the north-west of England, we now have the evidence ... confirming that this is precisely the wrong approach to adopt if we want to tackle the problem of alcohol-related health and social problems amongst teenagers.

The results indicate that the teenagers most likely to drink regularly, to excess, and in public are girls from the most socially deprived areas who receive the most weekly pocket money. In contrast, those who drink alcohol with their parents, are members of youth groups, and receive less than £10 pocket money a week are less likely to binge drink. Quite clearly we have something to learn from the continental lifestyle, where people are introduced to small amounts of alcohol at family mealtimes while they are still young.