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The
Ragged Trousered Piss-Artists?
You could see
it coming, of course. Earlier this week the New York Times columnist
Nichloas D Kristof wrote
from Africa: “if the poorest families spent as much money educating
their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their
children’s prospects would be transformed”.
He was swiftly
put down, for instance by the website Aidwatch:
“Is it really such a big surprise that the poor also want recreation?
That the poor have a life? Including some of the same vices that the
rich have?” asked William
Easterly and Laura Freschi.
Yet
Kristof’s obnoxious attitude is one with a long history and, in
subtler forms, underlies much of the anti-drink rhetoric in the
developed as well as the developing world.
Nineteenth
century temperance also tended to blame poverty on alcohol, and even the
early labour movement (though not its Marxist wing) thought that working
people spent too much time drinking in the pub when they could be
improving themselves.
Robert
Tressell’s chapters on the Cricketers Arms – licensee: A Harpy - in
the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists are a good example.
These
days the temperance position is argued in the language of health and
policing. When someone takes a drink over the recommended limit, when
the young hit the streets on a Saturday night, as the young have always
done, they’re behaving irrationally – not exercising the right to
enjoy themselves.
Meanwhile,
the latest stats show
that alcohol consumption in England is down, but that alcohol-related
disease and death is up, which much play being made of the increased
amount of drugs prescribed to treat alcohol dependency.
Rising
unemployment and the cuts planned by the new government will mean this
trend of falling consumption and rising problems will continue.
On
the positive side, we are beginning to better understand how we can help
the minority of people who are being damaged by drink. Also this week
Drug & Alcohol Findings released a report
that shows how effective brief alcohol interventions can be in helping
problem drinkers cut back.
A
brief alcohol intervention is, for instance, when your doctor tells you
to cut down a little. People tend to follow that advice.
So
the evidence is mounting for alcohol policy to be targeted at the level
of individual rather than strategies that try to reduce total
consumption. At the moment, though, we’re heading in exactly the
opposite direction.
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