11 ms·

Minimum unit pricing may have helped reduce alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow

72 points by DanBC 7y ago

ApolloFortyNine 7y ago
Japan is sitting at .25 deaths per 100k without any such law. [1] Sounds like this is a case of "law of small numbers." The deaths dropped by 40 in a single year in a single city? 40 people? Does that not see drastically small to use to back something like this up? I only thought of Japan because they sell alcohol (beer and sake) in vending machines there. Doesn't really get much easier to buy than that. And alcohol is popular there, it's not as if it's a country with prohibition. [1] https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alcohol/by-country/ https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alcohol/b...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- VangelicSurgeon 7y ago
  I haven’t seen alcohol vending machines here in Tokyo in many years, however you are correct that alcohol is cheap and easily available. You can buy a 330ml can of 9% alcohol drink called Strong Zero at the supermarket for close to ¥100. Many restaurants offer ‘all you can drink’ specials for as little as ¥1200 for two hours. I’m actually surprised that alcohol related deaths are so low.
  - sushid 7y ago
    Just travelled to Osaka and I can confirm They have vending machine with alcohol here although I literally only found one so far in my trip.
choeger 7y ago
Eli5 how does minimum unit pricing work exactly?
- throwaway66920 7y ago
  Presumably you can’t go below a certain price per liter
  - inops 7y ago
    Per unit. The effects of a litre of vodka isn't the effects of a litre of cider.
  - recursion 7y ago
    Basically. There is a minimum price set of 0.50 per unit. This means a bottle of whisky, 70cl at 37.5% ABV cannot retail for less than £14 whereas previously these would be on promotion sometimes at £11/£12/£13. By setting it per unit instead of quantity of drink the government targets super strength cheap cider etc that were linked to lots of anti-social behaviour and crime.
    - tomjen3 7y ago
      How about an offer of 15 with a 3 pound non-transferable (therefore worthless) store credit?
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    Yes - per liter of pure ethanol. If you buy a pint of regular lager beer you are buying basically 0.56L times 5.2% alcohol which is 2.9 cl pure ethanol, or as a brit would some times say "about 3 units". So a minimum proce per unit is the same as a minimum price per litre of pure ethanol. The minimum price per liter of ethanol is 100x the minimum price per unit (since one unit is 1 cl pure ethanol). The reason this is so fantastically confusing is because sometimes even regulators use "alcohol" to refer to the drink, and not the ethanol.
- brianmcc 7y ago
  Per unit of alcohol -> https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7130/economics/minimum-price-for-alcohol-pros-and-cons/ https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7130/economics/minimum-pr...
- 7y ago
bodyfour 7y ago
On the other hand, maybe some are moving on to harder stuff? https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/07/18/scotland-overtakes-america-as-the-worlds-drug-overdose-capital https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/07/18/scotland-overta...
- nmeofthestate 7y ago
  That's a long-standing problem - middle-aged addicts are starting to suffer from a lifetime of drug abuse. But yeah, maybe if you can't get ultra-cheap cider you pop out for some heroin instead.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Three-quarters of the dead were men and three-quarters were aged over 35. This problem has been creeping up for a while, many of these people have been abusing themselves for a long time and are now paying the price.
- krilly 7y ago
  That's been the experience among my circle of friends (cash strapped students). Why spend a fortune on beer when you can get a strong pill for a fiver?
  - fhbdukfrh 7y ago
    I've also heard this proposed as a risk of vaping. You get hooked on nicotine, can no longer afford expensive e-juice and switch to cigarettes. I think it's too early to know if this is the case, but the complete opposite of what vaping promoters try to sell
  - nmeofthestate 7y ago
    Minimum unit pricing doesn't really affect beer - certainly not in a way that makes it cost a "fortune". It makes cans cost a few pence more than ones that you could get on a special offer in England. And people have been taking pills forever - it's not something people have started resorting to now they have to pay fifty pence more to get pissed on lager.
brianmcc 7y ago
Apologies for some domestic political comment on HN - but surely the Scotsman isn't about to give the terrible SNP credit for something?! Was there not a more negative spin they could've used, e.g. "deaths fall by smaller percent than promised/hoped"? I note this policy is being mooted UK wide - good. Overuse - and outright abuse - of alcohol is so prevalent and "normal" in the UK it's shocking. Impact to prices in bars and supermarkets has been totally negligible to anyone enjoying e.g. a pretty cheap £6 bottle of wine or four-beers-for-£5 bundles. It's the supercheap £3 for 2L of strong cider this policy's targeted at and it looks like it might be helping.
- bArray 7y ago
  > I note this policy is being mooted UK wide - good. To moot is to argue, but then your next statement seems to suggest you want the policy to be rolled out across the UK? Are you for or against rolling this policy out across the UK? I currently live in New Zealand where alcohol is relatively expensive and it has a massive drinking problem for young persons. When I go back to the UK, the problem is about the same, but the young people aren't going broke buying alcohol. I don't think it works. Increasing the price of Tobacco didn't do much to stop smoking, but vaping and preventing smoking in public areas did. Changing social attitudes to smoking is fundamentally what reduced it. Personally, I think it's better to use the carrot and not the stick. It shouldn't be the responsibility of the state to raise people's children correctly. I think this works in my experience. As a child, my parents would let me have a small drink with a meal. As I grew up I never felt the need to drink to excess, I knew how alcohol worked. My sibling had the same experience and doesn't drink. My younger sibling still, was prevented from drinking anything and then went crazy when they legally could.
  - Rapzid 7y ago
    I'm going to propose that your having a drink when you were a child and "knowing how alcohol worked" has absolutely nothing to do with your lack of a drinking problem..
  - twic 7y ago
    "mooted" here means "considered". The authorities are considering extending this policy from Scotland to the whole of the UK. brianmcc is in favour of this.
ChrisSD 7y ago
Legalising safer drugs would also be an option.
- samsari 7y ago
  Unfortunately not something that's within the power of the Scottish Government to enact, as it is a "reserved" matter - a legal power not devolved to the Scottish executive. There is a strong desire for "shooting galleries" in Scotland (safe spaces to take drugs where help and clean needles are available) but the UK government and the Scottish government have very different policies on drugs.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  You got that right. Alcohol is a straight up dirty drug that’s only around because it was simple to make and a part of Roman culture.
  - epicureanideal 7y ago
    I wonder if there's a startup (or multiple) here? If you take GABA supplements it has some minor version of the affect of alcohol, and if I remember correctly alcohol is a GABA inhibitor. Is there a way to engineer a better, safer, equally or more enjoyable alcohol, maybe with less judgement impairment?
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      Plenty of such compounds in existence. But getting a recreational drug « approved » for sale is difficult. But maybe not impossible. And chances are the attributes that make it relatively safe in 500mL-beer-equivalents probably make it possible to consume 10x amounts for 10x pleasure but still 5x worse negative effects than that 500mL beer. Alcohol’s side effects contribute to its self-limiting self-administration for a good chunk of the population.
    - buttcoinslol 7y ago
      This is what benzodiazepines are[0] and they are not safer than alcohol[1][2]. Alcohol and benzodiazepines are cross-tolerant with each other[3]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6147796 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6147796 [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19465812 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19465812 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816010/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816010/ [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2712270/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2712270/
jolts 7y ago
blaze it faggots
hogFeast 7y ago
England doesn't have this policy. The rate of alcohol-related deaths is half of that in Scotland. And alcohol is only one issue among many. Increasing the cost of alcohol may reduce the number of alcohol-related deaths but what is actually doing for people who need help? Either they have less money or they go somewhere else. The meta of this policy is kind of interesting too. This kind of price tinkering, control freakery is very New Labour (and probably Conservatives now too, although to a lesser extent). It feels sophisticated, and it is usually accompanied by research from very serious civil servants who model the impact down to the decimal point. The problem is that these policies always has unintended consequences, you use your blunt instrument to achieve your primary aim...but then other stuff happens. I get that we need to give economists jobs...but can't they just do it somewhere else? Rather than tinkering with prices, why not focus on exactly why these people are making these choices? The govt has had long enough. And, from what I have read, NHS Scotland just whine about poverty (and now austerity the bogeyman de jour). We have known for years (over a decade iirc) that these effects still exist after income (rich people in Scotland die faster than in England too). Maybe that is a link worth examining: doctors playing politics and patients with poor life expectancy? Ineffective policy-makers (there is little evidence that the govt are particularly competent in anything other than railing against "Westminster")? Ineffective managers in the NHS?
- DanBC 7y ago
  > England doesn't have this policy ...yet, but it's probably coming. We know that pricing works to change behaviour. We see this with tobacco, plastic bags, sugary drinks, alcohol. It works, and it works really well. Ideally the increased revenue would be hypothecated to alcohol treatment, but hypothecation is a tricky topic for some reason in the UK.
  - smileypete 7y ago
    >We know that pricing works to change behaviour. Only to those in lower socio-economic groups materially affected by the change in prices. So in one sense it's really just exerting more control over the poorer groups of society.
defertoreptar 7y ago
> Glasgow has had a 21.5 per cent reduction in alcohol-related deaths from 2017 to 2018 - down from 186 to 146. They really should be tracking all alcohol and drug-related deaths instead of pretending that we live in a world free of negative externalities.
- DanBC 7y ago
  Why do you think they're not tracking drug related deaths? https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/vital-events/deaths/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics...
  - magashna 7y ago
    Then they should note that drug related deaths went up by 27% from 2017-18 https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/drug-related-deaths/2018/drug-related-deaths-18-pub.pdf https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/drug-related...
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      Whatever figures you want shown, aso show what they are doing in areas that have not had a comparable policy change.
- sparkzilla 7y ago
  The total deaths went down by 40? How many of them can be directly attributed to this policy?
ck425 7y ago
Is it not a bit soon to be drawing conclusions? Also there are so many other factors involved. I'm a scotsman and I'm personally not a fan of this law, nor the 10am-10pm licensing laws. They're blunt instruments that fail to tackle the root causes. I'm not saying they don't work or that they're not relatively easy to implement but I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see an increase in deaths from other drugs.
- bArray 7y ago
  Agreed, correlation is not equal to causation. I think alcohol, drugs, mental illness and suicide should all be looked at together (at the very least). I suspect they might be just moving the problem elsewhere. Of course their statistics on drugs abuse will be approximations because people won't want to share their illegal habits. I was told a funny story from my Russian friend where they introduced some law to prevent people buying hard liquor after 10pm to curb alcoholism. He was quite amused to see people running into the shop at 9:55pm with a trolley and back out just before 10pm with a trolley full of hard liquor.
- wastedhours 7y ago
  > 10am-10pm licensing laws I didn't know this was a thing until going to Edinburgh for the first time a couple of years ago. The queue and item makeup at 9.45 made me see the flaw in this plan quite quickly.
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Ugh. Now it's like England. I didn't know that either but I suppose because I'm old I've not tried to drink after 10pm recently.
    - makomk 7y ago
      England gave up on the mandatory hard cut-off at 11pm a decade or so ago exactly because it seemed counterproductive.
- Someone1234 7y ago
hidiegomariani 7y ago
“May have”
reportgunner 7y ago
"may have" so it really hasn't ? How do you read the title ? Glasgow has had a 21.5 per cent reduction in alcohol-related deaths from 2017 to 2018 - down from 186 to 146 Yep.
- epicureanideal 7y ago
  One year with numbers that small doesn't prove it yet though. Maybe they're just exited about the possibility of another referendum on Scottish independence. Who knows, with this data.
gtfratteus 7y ago
What a terrible, unethical law. Punishing the masses for the sins of the few. I'd much rather have alcoholics drinking themselves to death by their own free will than have to pay more for alcohol myself.
RichardHeart 7y ago
"Minimum unit pricing" Just means making alcohol more expensive. Headline from 6-19-2019 "Alcohol sales in Scotland hit 25 year low after minimum unit pricing introduced." Here's their governments website: https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Health/Services/Alcohol/minimum-pricing https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Health/Services/Alcohol/minimum...

72 points by DanBC 7y ago

Japan is sitting at .25 deaths per 100k without any such law. [1] Sounds like this is a case of "law of small numbers." The deaths dropped by 40 in a single year in a single city? 40 people? Does that not see drastically small to use to back something like this up? I only thought of Japan because they sell alcohol (beer and sake) in vending machines there. Doesn't really get much easier to buy than that. And alcohol is popular there, it's not as if it's a country with prohibition. [1] https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alcohol/by-country/ https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alcohol/b...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
VangelicSurgeon 7y ago
I haven’t seen alcohol vending machines here in Tokyo in many years, however you are correct that alcohol is cheap and easily available. You can buy a 330ml can of 9% alcohol drink called Strong Zero at the supermarket for close to ¥100. Many restaurants offer ‘all you can drink’ specials for as little as ¥1200 for two hours. I’m actually surprised that alcohol related deaths are so low.
- sushid 7y ago
  Just travelled to Osaka and I can confirm They have vending machine with alcohol here although I literally only found one so far in my trip.

choeger 7y ago

Eli5 how does minimum unit pricing work exactly?

throwaway66920 7y ago
Presumably you can’t go below a certain price per liter
- inops 7y ago
  Per unit. The effects of a litre of vodka isn't the effects of a litre of cider.
- recursion 7y ago
  Basically. There is a minimum price set of 0.50 per unit. This means a bottle of whisky, 70cl at 37.5% ABV cannot retail for less than £14 whereas previously these would be on promotion sometimes at £11/£12/£13. By setting it per unit instead of quantity of drink the government targets super strength cheap cider etc that were linked to lots of anti-social behaviour and crime.
  - tomjen3 7y ago
    How about an offer of 15 with a 3 pound non-transferable (therefore worthless) store credit?
- alkonaut 7y ago
  Yes - per liter of pure ethanol. If you buy a pint of regular lager beer you are buying basically 0.56L times 5.2% alcohol which is 2.9 cl pure ethanol, or as a brit would some times say "about 3 units". So a minimum proce per unit is the same as a minimum price per litre of pure ethanol. The minimum price per liter of ethanol is 100x the minimum price per unit (since one unit is 1 cl pure ethanol). The reason this is so fantastically confusing is because sometimes even regulators use "alcohol" to refer to the drink, and not the ethanol.
brianmcc 7y ago
Per unit of alcohol -> https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7130/economics/minimum-price-for-alcohol-pros-and-cons/ https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7130/economics/minimum-pr...
7y ago

bodyfour 7y ago

On the other hand, maybe some are moving on to harder stuff? https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/07/18/scotland-overtakes-america-as-the-worlds-drug-overdose-capital https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/07/18/scotland-overta...

nmeofthestate 7y ago
That's a long-standing problem - middle-aged addicts are starting to suffer from a lifetime of drug abuse. But yeah, maybe if you can't get ultra-cheap cider you pop out for some heroin instead.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Three-quarters of the dead were men and three-quarters were aged over 35. This problem has been creeping up for a while, many of these people have been abusing themselves for a long time and are now paying the price.
krilly 7y ago
That's been the experience among my circle of friends (cash strapped students). Why spend a fortune on beer when you can get a strong pill for a fiver?
- fhbdukfrh 7y ago
  I've also heard this proposed as a risk of vaping. You get hooked on nicotine, can no longer afford expensive e-juice and switch to cigarettes. I think it's too early to know if this is the case, but the complete opposite of what vaping promoters try to sell
- nmeofthestate 7y ago
  Minimum unit pricing doesn't really affect beer - certainly not in a way that makes it cost a "fortune". It makes cans cost a few pence more than ones that you could get on a special offer in England. And people have been taking pills forever - it's not something people have started resorting to now they have to pay fifty pence more to get pissed on lager.

brianmcc 7y ago

Apologies for some domestic political comment on HN - but surely the Scotsman isn't about to give the terrible SNP credit for something?! Was there not a more negative spin they could've used, e.g. "deaths fall by smaller percent than promised/hoped"? I note this policy is being mooted UK wide - good. Overuse - and outright abuse - of alcohol is so prevalent and "normal" in the UK it's shocking. Impact to prices in bars and supermarkets has been totally negligible to anyone enjoying e.g. a pretty cheap £6 bottle of wine or four-beers-for-£5 bundles. It's the supercheap £3 for 2L of strong cider this policy's targeted at and it looks like it might be helping.

bArray 7y ago
> I note this policy is being mooted UK wide - good. To moot is to argue, but then your next statement seems to suggest you want the policy to be rolled out across the UK? Are you for or against rolling this policy out across the UK? I currently live in New Zealand where alcohol is relatively expensive and it has a massive drinking problem for young persons. When I go back to the UK, the problem is about the same, but the young people aren't going broke buying alcohol. I don't think it works. Increasing the price of Tobacco didn't do much to stop smoking, but vaping and preventing smoking in public areas did. Changing social attitudes to smoking is fundamentally what reduced it. Personally, I think it's better to use the carrot and not the stick. It shouldn't be the responsibility of the state to raise people's children correctly. I think this works in my experience. As a child, my parents would let me have a small drink with a meal. As I grew up I never felt the need to drink to excess, I knew how alcohol worked. My sibling had the same experience and doesn't drink. My younger sibling still, was prevented from drinking anything and then went crazy when they legally could.
- Rapzid 7y ago
  I'm going to propose that your having a drink when you were a child and "knowing how alcohol worked" has absolutely nothing to do with your lack of a drinking problem..
- twic 7y ago
  "mooted" here means "considered". The authorities are considering extending this policy from Scotland to the whole of the UK. brianmcc is in favour of this.

ChrisSD 7y ago

Legalising safer drugs would also be an option.

samsari 7y ago
Unfortunately not something that's within the power of the Scottish Government to enact, as it is a "reserved" matter - a legal power not devolved to the Scottish executive. There is a strong desire for "shooting galleries" in Scotland (safe spaces to take drugs where help and clean needles are available) but the UK government and the Scottish government have very different policies on drugs.
Scoundreller 7y ago
You got that right. Alcohol is a straight up dirty drug that’s only around because it was simple to make and a part of Roman culture.
- epicureanideal 7y ago
  I wonder if there's a startup (or multiple) here? If you take GABA supplements it has some minor version of the affect of alcohol, and if I remember correctly alcohol is a GABA inhibitor. Is there a way to engineer a better, safer, equally or more enjoyable alcohol, maybe with less judgement impairment?
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Plenty of such compounds in existence. But getting a recreational drug « approved » for sale is difficult. But maybe not impossible. And chances are the attributes that make it relatively safe in 500mL-beer-equivalents probably make it possible to consume 10x amounts for 10x pleasure but still 5x worse negative effects than that 500mL beer. Alcohol’s side effects contribute to its self-limiting self-administration for a good chunk of the population.
  - buttcoinslol 7y ago
    This is what benzodiazepines are[0] and they are not safer than alcohol[1][2]. Alcohol and benzodiazepines are cross-tolerant with each other[3]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6147796 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6147796 [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19465812 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19465812 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816010/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816010/ [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2712270/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2712270/

jolts 7y ago

blaze it faggots

hogFeast 7y ago

England doesn't have this policy. The rate of alcohol-related deaths is half of that in Scotland. And alcohol is only one issue among many. Increasing the cost of alcohol may reduce the number of alcohol-related deaths but what is actually doing for people who need help? Either they have less money or they go somewhere else. The meta of this policy is kind of interesting too. This kind of price tinkering, control freakery is very New Labour (and probably Conservatives now too, although to a lesser extent). It feels sophisticated, and it is usually accompanied by research from very serious civil servants who model the impact down to the decimal point. The problem is that these policies always has unintended consequences, you use your blunt instrument to achieve your primary aim...but then other stuff happens. I get that we need to give economists jobs...but can't they just do it somewhere else? Rather than tinkering with prices, why not focus on exactly why these people are making these choices? The govt has had long enough. And, from what I have read, NHS Scotland just whine about poverty (and now austerity the bogeyman de jour). We have known for years (over a decade iirc) that these effects still exist after income (rich people in Scotland die faster than in England too). Maybe that is a link worth examining: doctors playing politics and patients with poor life expectancy? Ineffective policy-makers (there is little evidence that the govt are particularly competent in anything other than railing against "Westminster")? Ineffective managers in the NHS?

DanBC 7y ago
> England doesn't have this policy ...yet, but it's probably coming. We know that pricing works to change behaviour. We see this with tobacco, plastic bags, sugary drinks, alcohol. It works, and it works really well. Ideally the increased revenue would be hypothecated to alcohol treatment, but hypothecation is a tricky topic for some reason in the UK.
- smileypete 7y ago
  >We know that pricing works to change behaviour. Only to those in lower socio-economic groups materially affected by the change in prices. So in one sense it's really just exerting more control over the poorer groups of society.

defertoreptar 7y ago

> Glasgow has had a 21.5 per cent reduction in alcohol-related deaths from 2017 to 2018 - down from 186 to 146. They really should be tracking all alcohol and drug-related deaths instead of pretending that we live in a world free of negative externalities.

DanBC 7y ago
Why do you think they're not tracking drug related deaths? https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/vital-events/deaths/drug-related-deaths-in-scotland https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics...
- magashna 7y ago
  Then they should note that drug related deaths went up by 27% from 2017-18 https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/drug-related-deaths/2018/drug-related-deaths-18-pub.pdf https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/drug-related...
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    Whatever figures you want shown, aso show what they are doing in areas that have not had a comparable policy change.
sparkzilla 7y ago
The total deaths went down by 40? How many of them can be directly attributed to this policy?

ck425 7y ago

Is it not a bit soon to be drawing conclusions? Also there are so many other factors involved. I'm a scotsman and I'm personally not a fan of this law, nor the 10am-10pm licensing laws. They're blunt instruments that fail to tackle the root causes. I'm not saying they don't work or that they're not relatively easy to implement but I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see an increase in deaths from other drugs.

bArray 7y ago
Agreed, correlation is not equal to causation. I think alcohol, drugs, mental illness and suicide should all be looked at together (at the very least). I suspect they might be just moving the problem elsewhere. Of course their statistics on drugs abuse will be approximations because people won't want to share their illegal habits. I was told a funny story from my Russian friend where they introduced some law to prevent people buying hard liquor after 10pm to curb alcoholism. He was quite amused to see people running into the shop at 9:55pm with a trolley and back out just before 10pm with a trolley full of hard liquor.
wastedhours 7y ago
> 10am-10pm licensing laws I didn't know this was a thing until going to Edinburgh for the first time a couple of years ago. The queue and item makeup at 9.45 made me see the flaw in this plan quite quickly.
- dboreham 7y ago
  Ugh. Now it's like England. I didn't know that either but I suppose because I'm old I've not tried to drink after 10pm recently.
  - makomk 7y ago
    England gave up on the mandatory hard cut-off at 11pm a decade or so ago exactly because it seemed counterproductive.
Someone1234 7y ago

hidiegomariani 7y ago

“May have”

reportgunner 7y ago

"may have" so it really hasn't ? How do you read the title ? Glasgow has had a 21.5 per cent reduction in alcohol-related deaths from 2017 to 2018 - down from 186 to 146 Yep.

epicureanideal 7y ago
One year with numbers that small doesn't prove it yet though. Maybe they're just exited about the possibility of another referendum on Scottish independence. Who knows, with this data.

gtfratteus 7y ago

What a terrible, unethical law. Punishing the masses for the sins of the few. I'd much rather have alcoholics drinking themselves to death by their own free will than have to pay more for alcohol myself.

RichardHeart 7y ago

"Minimum unit pricing" Just means making alcohol more expensive. Headline from 6-19-2019 "Alcohol sales in Scotland hit 25 year low after minimum unit pricing introduced." Here's their governments website: https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Health/Services/Alcohol/minimum-pricing https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Health/Services/Alcohol/minimum...