The temperance time machine

Minimum pricing worked if you pretend it happened twelve years earlier

The Toronto Star is looking to Scotland to teach it how to reduce alcohol-related deaths. In an article titled ‘How Scotland started to kick its alcohol problem — and what Ontario could learn from it’, it pushes back on plans to liberalise Ontario’s state monopoly on alcohol retail, saying:

Ontario officials say they are fulfilling a 2018 election promise to increase “choice and convenience for shoppers and support Ontario retailers, domestic producers and workers in the alcohol industry.”

But Scotland has cut alcohol-related hospital admissions by 40 per cent and deaths by almost half. While in Ontario, alcohol-related admissions have risen by a third and deaths by almost half, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.

How did Scotland supposedly achieve this public health miracle?

The key part of Scotland’s landmark policy was aimed at reducing drinking by introducing minimum unit prices to make drinking more expensive.

Ontario already has minimum pricing and Scotland doesn’t have a state alcohol monopoly, so it is not obvious what lessons Ontarians are supposed to be learning, but put that to one side for a moment and consider the main claim.

Anyone who has been following events in Scotland knows that alcohol-specific deaths have risen since minimum pricing was introduced in 2018 and have generally risen since 2012 following a significant downturn in the years prior.

It is that drop between 2006 and 2012 that the Toronto Star must be referring to when it claims that deaths fell by ‘almost half’ (actually a third). But the Scottish government didn’t pass any anti-alcohol legislation in those six years and it certainly didn’t have minimum pricing. The newspaper mentions that the drink-drive limit was cut, but that didn’t happen until 2014 and the evidence is clear that it had no effect on road accidents.

Since the Toronto Star doesn’t mention when the decline in alcohol-specific deaths took place, it is leading its readers to believe that it coincided with the introduction of minimum pricing and the lowering of the drink-drive limit. I call that lying.

It is strangely fitting that Canadians are being lied to about the ‘success’ of Scotland’s alcohol strategy since the Scottish public were conned into accepting minimum pricing, in part, on the basis of lies told about the ‘success’ of minimum pricing in Canada. The neo-temperance academic Tim Stockwell, who is quoted in the Star article, published a series of studies in the 2010s making some absurd claims about minimum pricing that were parroted by campaigners in the UK. In 2013, for example, Dr Vivienne Nathanson of the British Medical Association, said:"

“Real-life experience of minimum pricing in Canada has shown some tremendous results – with a 10% increase in the price of cheapest drinks leading to a 32% reduction in wholly alcohol-related deaths.”

In the same year, Alastair Campbell wrote:

“Where minimum unit pricing has been tried in British Columbia, a 10 per cent price increase led to a one-third fall in deaths attributed to alcohol.”

A 10% increase in the minimum price leading to a 32% reduction in deaths should be enough to set off anyone’s bullshit-detector. British Columbia didn’t even have minimum pricing as we understand it. The claim came from a model devised by Stockwell which made so many unexplained adjustments to the data that it produced findings that bore no resemblance to reality.

Here is what actually happened to alcohol-specific deaths in British Columbia in the period in question. The increases in the social reference pricing of various types of alcohol occurred in stages in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2009. Stockwell’s study ignored 2010 and 2011, even though he had the data at the time. Even so, it is obvious that there was no decline of 32%, or really any decline at all.

Again, I call this a lie. You may call it a fairy-tale. Certainly, we are in the realms of mythology. Through gaslighting and repetition, the public are told a story that is patently untrue.

It would be interesting to know why alcohol-specific deaths fell so sharply between 2006 and 2012, but there is little interest in this from ‘public health’ academics because it cannot be attributed to the kind of policies they support. The Star mentions brief interventions, rolled out in 2008, and that may be part of the answer, but they involve talking to actual alcoholics about their actual problems and are therefore not considered sexy enough for killjoy quackademics who want to make everybody drink less.

In the absence of any decent evidence that their ‘whole population’ policies have done any good, they are now resorting to a time machine approach in which a policy can be portrayed as successful by pretending it happened 12 years earlier. In a rational world, it shouldn’t be possible to do this, but all that is needed is a pliant journalist and a few dishonest activists and there is no shortage of them.