A startling report in The Times on New Year’s Eve blamed a steep rise in sexually transmitted infections among teenagers on the fact that alcohol is cheaper than water.
According to the journalists, an ‘unprecedented alliance’ of public health experts, doctors & sexual health advisers, led by the Royal College of Physicians & the British Association of Sexual Health & HIV is demanding that Something Must Be Done. In particular supermarkets should stop ignoring calls for a more responsible approach to pricing.
My suspicions were aroused by the finger pointed at Asda where cider is on sale at 70p a litre, compared with £1.35 for a litre of one brand of sparkling water. This turns out to be based on a quite separate exercise by Times journalists, who presumably failed to notice that Asda sell their own version of fizzy water for less that 10p per litre, & that cola & other ordinary pop type drinks cost nearly £2 in the popular small size bottles.
The report about sexual health & alcohol in fact points out that “Young people are more likely to drink higher strength drinks such as spirits ... and flavoured spirit based ‘alcopops’ ... with girls being more likely to drink spirits and wines than boys” &, while concerned about the affordability of alcohol compared with 1980, makes no specific recommendations on what desirable price relatives might be.
The government might, not altogether wittingly, have already done something to address the problem. According to the medical experts report teenagers with a weekly income of £30 a week are twice as likely as those with £10 a week to drink frequently in public places; £30 a week was the means tested sum given, in the form of Education Maintenance Allowance, to those from poorer backgrounds who stayed on at school or college. This has now been abolished in England.
And the Times journalists should have turned their report into a complaint about the rip off prices of internationally branded non-alcoholic drinks.
