Minimum pricing copium

They're getting really desperate now

Efforts to show that minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol ‘worked’ in Scotland have plumbed new depths with a study which claims that merely announcing the policy was enough to reduce levels of heavy drinking. MUP became law in Scotland in 2012 but was held up in the courts until 2017 and not introduced until May 2018.

The new study looked at rates of heavy drinking - defined as 14+ units a week for women and 21+ units a week for men - which have been going down for two decades, as shown below.

As you can see, the big decline occurred between 2003 and 2013, after which rates barely moved at all until the pandemic.

More important (or so you might think) is the steep decline in alcohol-specific deaths that took place in Scotland between 2006 and 2012, but ‘public health’ academics show little interest in this because the SNP were not in charge and there are no nanny state interventions to take the credit. Instead, they claim that MUP led to a decline in deaths after 2018 which is, to say the least, not obvious from this graph.

The authors of the new study focus on two periods: 2012-17 and 2018-21. They compare these periods to 2008-11 and to neighbouring countries and conclude that…

All available indicators of drinking behaviour point to positive changes in the pattern of drinking since 2012 and these changes continued after 2018 when the MUP policy was enacted.

Since alcohol-specific deaths were at a 14 year high in 2021, it could be argued that there is at least one ‘indictor of drinking behaviour’ that has not changed for the better. And since the alcohol-specific death rate has been generally rising since 2012, it could also be argued that none of their indicators are a good proxy for harm.

No such arguments are to be found in the study, however. Instead, the authors claim that the declines in heavy drinking and overall drinking between 2012 and 2017 were caused by MUP despite MUP not being in effect. How could this be? It is because MUP is such a powerful policy that the government only had to announce it for people to start drinking less.

I am not kidding. Here are the authors in their own semi-literate words…

… the decline of current drinking rates after 2012 was statistically significant while the decrease trend [sic] appeared from 2013 onward was not. This could be explained as pre-2012 Scottish government [sic] has taken two policy actions consecutively both aimed to suppress [sic] alcohol purchasing: a multi-buy discount ban (October 2011) and government’ [sic] intention to implement MUP (June 2012).

The multi-buy ban had no effect on alcohol consumption, as two studies - including the official NHS evaluation - concluded.

As for the announcement of MUP leading to a reduction in drinking, there is no evidence for this and it is very hard to believe. It certainly isn’t what ‘public health’ academics were saying between 2012 and 2018 when they were complaining that people were needlessly dying as a result on the ongoing delay. But they have to pretend that there was an important policy initiative in 2012 because…

… the changes in overall drinking and the amount consumed after 2012 was more prominent than the decline observed after 2018

They then wonder aloud about what would have happened if MUP had been introduced in 2012…

Perhaps, if it was not due to the repeated legal challenges led by the Scotch Whisky Association from 2012 to 2017, the impact of MUP’s announcement would have been superseded by that of its enactment though this is speculation.

Well, yes. You would hope that implementing a policy would have more effect than announcing a policy, wouldn’t you? But this is modern ‘public health’ and the policies are so ineffective that it makes no real difference whether you introduce them or not.

Regular readers will know that we have been here before. When plain packaging for tobacco failed to have any impact on smoking rates when it came into effect in 2017, the authors of the post-implementation review gave the policy credit for an unusually large drop in smoking prevalence between 2015 and 2016 (which was probably caused by a large rise in vaping in 2016) and speculated that “smokers were influenced more by the prospect of standardised packs … than the actual adoption of standardised packaging”. Sure, Jan.

When the sugar tax failed to have any effect on childhood obesity, quackademics created dodgy models to show that obesity would have risen even faster if the tax had not been introduced, but even these could not find an effect in 2018 when the tax was actually introduced so they focused instead on a supposed (relative) decline in 2016 when the tax was announced. Studies looking at the sugar tax in relation to tooth decay and sugar consumption have done the same thing. The rationale is that the announcement led to reformulation of soft drinks, but this didn’t happen in 2016 and most of it didn’t happen until 2018. It is another cope.

The authors of the new study conclude that…

This study offers evidence that the announcement and enactment of MUP in Scotland produced changes in drinking behaviours consistent with efforts to improve public health.

And yet public health did not improve. The number of alcohol-specific deaths has been rising in Scotland since 2012. How could that be?

The analyses suggested that there was a reduction in the amount of alcohol consumed, and in the prevalence of overall drinking as well as heavy drinking, but as yet, not to a significant rate or significant decrease in drinking amount by harmful drinkers.

Harmful drinking is defined as 50+ units a week for men and 35+ units for women. Since harmful drinking did not decline, it is hardly surprising that alcohol-related harm did not decline. In other words, minimum pricing didn’t work.