Price of alcohol is 'obscenely low'

Heavy drinkers are being subsidised by ordinary shoppers in supermarkets, according to medical experts
Bottles and crates of alcohol on a supermarket checkout
Ian Gilmore, consultant at Royal Liverpool Hospital, said supermarkets were using cut-price alcohol to pull in shoppers. Photograph: David Kilpatrick/Alamy

The price of alcohol is "obscenely low" and heavy drinkers are being subsidised by ordinary shoppers in supermarkets, according to medical experts. Speaking at the British Science Festival in Bradford on Tuesday, they called for more government action on the rising consumption of alcohol and its negative health consequences.

"A gram of cocaine in Yorkshire costs £40 [whereas] 40 grams of alcohol costs a pound if you buy white cider at £2 for a 2 litre bottle," said Robin Davidson, a clinical psychologist and chair of the newly launched charity, Alcohol Research UK. "The price of this drug is obscenely low."

Ian Gilmore, consultant at Royal Liverpool Hospital and immediate past president of the Royal College of Physicians, said that moderate or non-drinkers are "almost certainly currently subsidising the heavy drinker in the supermarket. All the hooks to get people into supermarkets are drinks adverts – they're subsidising and discounting alcohol instead of fruit and vegetables. If there was no discounting of alcohol, it's likely that the shopping basket would be cheaper for people who do not drink heavily."

He added that the problems with alcohol abuse were increasing in the UK and, in just the past decade, he had seen a huge increase in alcohol-related illnesses. "Three in 100 of the men of Liverpool are admitted to the Royal Liverpool Hospital with an alcohol-related illness. Peak deaths are between 45 and 64 – unlike smoking, alcohol kills people in the most productive period of their life."

In study published earlier this year in the Lancet, Gilmore showed that if the UK reduced its overall consumption of alcohol to match European counterparts in France, Spain and Italy, the country could prevent more than 250,000 deaths from liver disease in the next 20 years.

One proposal to reduce consumption is to require retailers to attach a minimum price for alcoholic drinks, which reflects the number of units of alcohol they contain.

Martin Hagger, a psychologist at Curtin University in Australia, said that introducing a minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol would reduce alcohol consumption in the UK by about 7%, according to modelling carried out by the University of Sheffield and funded by the Department of Health. "That same modelling data suggests we can save up to £10bn in costs associated with excess alcohol consumption," he said. "Things like reducing the costs of treating alcohol-related harm but also the costs of managing the night-time economy, funding accident and emergency as a result of people being intoxicated on Friday nights."

For the launch of Alcohol Research UK, Curtin carried out a study where he interviewed 217 people in 28 focus groups around the north of England about their attitudes to minimum prices for alcohol.

"In concordance with our expectations, participants did express negative views of the minimum price per unit," said Hagger. "They were sceptical of its effects. They found the idea unfair to sensible drinkers and perceived that it might create or exacerbate other social problems – increases in crime or drug abuse where people who were heavily dependant might turn to crime to fund their alcohol abuse."

Despite that, many participants did accept that a minimum price per alcohol unit might be necessary to tackle the alcohol problems seen in society, particularly when it comes to binge drinking and people who drink high levels of alcohol.

To examine the issue further, Alcohol Research UK plans to carry out more work looking at the effects of minimum pricing of alcohol when it comes into force in Scotland.

"There's a lot of anecdote and bias in this debate and we're funding [a project] to look at the effect of minimum pricing when it's introduced in Scotland on the drinking habits of highly dependent drinkers," said Davidson. "The urban myth is that, if the price of alcohol goes up, the moderate drinkers are going to stop but the alcoholics will find a way to fund their addiction. We know that's probably not true and we're going to fund a major flagship project to explore that."

Andrew Opie, food director of the British Retail Consortium, said: "Food retailers are highly competitive and a large number of products of all kinds are always on promotion, including fresh fruit and vegetables. Supermarkets do everything they can to keep prices down for consumers and to give themselves an edge over their rivals. At the moment, almost 40% of all groceries going through the tills are on some sort of special offer.

"The majority of alcohol from supermarkets is bought alongside food as part of a general weekly shop. Introducing a minimum price for alcohol would penalise responsible and moderate drinkers but there's no evidence it would change the behaviour of the small minority who drink to excess."