Lessons from Scots’ pricing of booze
ANEW approach to the pricing of booze in Scotland should probably join the agenda for discussion, and possible implementation, in Jamaica in the face of deepening concerns over the island’s epidemic of lifestyle diseases and the debate over whether the Government should introduce a special tax on sugary drinks.
What the Scots have done is to establish, at the retail level, a minimum price for drinks based on their alcoholic content. So the higher a unit of alcohol in a product, the more the consumer pays. The base price is 50 pence per unit of pure alcohol in the beverage.
A rule of thumb is that 10 millilitres, or eight grams, represents a unit of alcohol. So, take a 75ml bottle of Wray and Nephew white overproof rum, whose alcohol by volume is 63 per cent, or around 472.5ml of pure alcohol. That translates to 47.25 units. In Scotland, based on the minimum unit price mechanism, that bottle of rum could not be legally sold for less than £23.62. A 341ml bottle of Red Stripe beer, with 4.7 per cent alcohol by volume, or 1.6 units of pure alcohol, would cost a little below a pound.
Significantly, unlike the excise duties or other volumetric rates manufacturers may pay, the minimum unit price is not a tax. Any increased earnings from it will stay in the tills of shop owners.
The Scots, however, don’t expect any great windfall to stores. Rather, in a country where consumers, in the past, could have their recommended maximum weekly intake of 14 units of alcohol for as little as £2.50 – that will now rise to £7.50 – they project that the price increase will lead to a decline in consumption of the formerly cheaper drinks that carried a high alcoholic content – very much as taxes on sugary drinks led to a decline in consumption in countries where it has been introduced.
RELATIVE CUT
Not only should this save lives, but over time, it should also result in a relative cut in the £3.6 billion spent on healthcare and in the justice system to treat alcohol-related illness and to address the crimes and antisocial behaviours sparked by drunkenness.
There are no immediately available analyses of the specific impact of alcohol – consumed frequently by four in 10 Jamaicans and by more than 70 per cent of the population some time in their lives – on people’s health or on the cost of healthcare, or on the justice system. But health officials agree that alcohol is a contributor to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as obesity and hypertension that kill about 70 per cent of the people – a quarter of them before the age of 70 – who die each year. The healthcare cost for NCDs runs into billions of dollars annually.
Notably, a 2016 survey by the National Council on Drug Abuse (NCDA) indicated that alcohol use had increased by 13 per cent over 15 years, largely among men, 13 per cent more of whom were drinking than at the start of the millennium.
It is not only via NCDs that alcohol is blamed for fatalities. There is no hard disaggregated data on its contribution to vehicular crashes, but law-enforcement and road-safety officials say it plays a part. Indeed, an early 1990s analysis of 31 road fatalities found alcohol in 78 per cent of victims and above-acceptable levels in 35 per cent. Another study in the 2000s found elevated alcohol levels in 43 per cent of drivers involved in traffic accidents.
Maybe it is that unlike sugary drinks, cigarettes, and ganja, we’ll determine that alcohol isn’t a problem requiring a fix. But at least, let’s have the conversation.