What next... Spanish Inquisition for anyone sucking a wine gum?

WHATEVER next? Soon the day will come when the drinking guidelines are dropped to zero and medics are forced to interrogate anybody who has ever sucked a wine gum. Over the past 40 years, official limits for men have fallen from 56 units a week to 36 units, then to 28 units, 21 units and now finally to 14 units. Every time the recommendations are lowered, the number of men classified as hazardous drinkers rises. There are now millions of us – hardly surprising, since 14 units a week is only a pint of beer a day, or a bottle and a half of wine per week.

When the chief medical officer in England first suggested the new guidelines earlier this year, it was controversial. A survey of more than 1,000 doctors published last week found most GPs do not agree with Sally Davies’s claim that there is ‘no safe level’ of drinking, and most think that moderate drinking can be part of a healthy lifestyle. Those of us who expressed scepticism about the scientific basis for the guidelines were told there was no need to worry. They are only recommendations, they said. We are free to ignore them, they said. They didn’t tell us that doctors will be forced to hassle us with a ‘brief intervention’ if we do. No one expected the Spanish Inquisition.

This is a waste of NHS resources and an insult to doctors and patients alike. Medical professionals are capable of identifying problem drinkers without being given orders from on high.

It is generally accepted that consuming 50 units or more is indicative of problem drinking. By now lowering the benchmark to 14 units, the Scottish Government is medicalising millions of people for no good reason. Successive governments have used doctors as mouthpieces for their hectoring.

It is virtually impossible to get through a routine appointment with a GP without being crossexamined about one’s eating, drinking and smoking habits. Countless hours are being swallowed up lecturing healthy, responsible adults about the bleeding obvious.

This is time that could otherwise be spent helping people who have a genuine drinking problem.

There is good evidence that targeted brief interventions work, but alcoholics are unlikely to take them seriously if everyone they know has had one.

As for the millions of people who exceed the stingy new guidelines, but drink moderately by any other measure, no good can come from making them feel as if they should be in The Priory.

There is an epidemic of the ‘worried well’ in Britain. Doctors tell me about healthy young people demanding full body scans because they fear they have contracted some disease or other as a result of not living the obsessively clean lifestyle that society demands.

These are the people who are most affected by ‘public health’ messages. Those genuinely at risk tend to ignore them.

We are constantly told that the NHS does not have enough money to heal the sick – yet it seems to have an unlimited budget for harassing the healthy.

Christopher Snowden is head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs