On most counts, I’m a big fan of Leo Varadkar. Ireland needs more public role models for its LGBT youth, and I can think of few better examples presently. But just as Mr Varadkar would rightly ask others to stay out of his bedroom and relationships, I would ask him to stay away from my lungs, liver, and wallet.
An imminent round of radical regulation pushed by the Health Minister would introduce plain packaging for tobacco and, separately, raise the minimum pricing of the cheapest units of alcohol. The common thread in these proposals is a desire to coerce socially optimal behaviour. But whose behaviour needs correcting, exactly?
Just as Mr Varadkar would rightly ask others to stay out of his bedroom and relationships, I would ask him to stay away from my lungs, liver, and wallet.
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A recent Irish Times piece on minimum alcohol pricing inadvertently highlights the main problem here. Joe Barry rightly cites the need to “broaden the range of measures to reduce our alcohol consumption,” including updating labels with more thorough health information and limiting advertising or sponsorship by alcohol brands. But the third and most important avenue of reform is pricing.
Mr Barry tells us that minimum unit pricing targets two vulnerable groups: “alcohol-dependent people and young drinkers who purchase alcohol at ‘pocket money prices’”. What that actually means, whether or not he chooses to admit it, is that minimum unit pricing targets poor alcohol-dependent people and poor young drinkers. If your choice of beverage is literally anything other than ”the cheapest cans or naggins I can find”, minimum pricing is not intended to affect your budgeting decisions in any way.
Similar attitudes pervade plain packaging measures for tobacco. People in lower income brackets are disproportionately more likely to smoke, in almost all contexts. Disagreements exist over causality, i.e. whether smoking makes you poor, or being poor makes you want to smoke (or some mixture thereof). Regardless, legislative efforts to vilify the activity must be seen as personal indictments of those who choose to take it up. In most cases, those people are among the most vulnerable groups in society and hardly benefit from further marginalisation.
Efforts to successfully moderate smoking and drinking must start with the understanding that rational people can choose to smoke and drink cheap alcohol. Those who do so are not uniquely the cause of society’s problems, and in fact are more often among it’s primary victims. If society decides there is still too much smoking and drinking going on, it does not necessarily require new legislative solutions. Irish alcohol consumption has dropped by 20 per cent per capita since the turn of the last decade, and existing tobacco legislation has already started a major cultural trend toward kicking the habit. The continuance of abuse at the margins should not obscure major signs of progress.
If your choice of beverage is literally anything other than ”the cheapest cans or naggins I can find”, minimum pricing is not intended to affect your budgeting decisions in any way.
Even if the proposed solutions are deemed desirable in principle, they may still be found lacking in their practical ability to reduce use and abuse. If one goal is to attack the heart of this nation’s dangerous alcohol culture, for example, minimum pricing is far from sufficient. It will make little difference to the 30-something professionals spending corporate paychecks on Harcourt Street if cans of Dutch Gold now cost €2.50. The only way to target a nationwide drinking culture with pricing is through across-the-board tax increases. Any other proposal with that stated goal is simply disingenuous.
Cigarettes follow the same logic; if you don’t want people to smoke, even if they’re fully aware of the consequences of doing so, make it more expensive. I don’t advocate doing this, but it’s at least a more genuine solution than pretending people buy tobacco because the packing of the physical product itself is in any way enticing. Most brands are monochromatic, and half the surface area is already covered in dire warnings anyway.
General tax increases would still be regressive – i.e. costing the poor a higher percentage of their income – but would at least be preferable to isolating blame against already marginalised communities. Advertising should be limited more broadly; for tobacco in particular this seems more important than changing packaging at the point of sale. But at the point where people are adequately aware of the consequences of their actions and protected from the obfuscation of industry advertising, the choice of the individual should be respected.
General tax increases would still be regressive – i.e. costing the poor a higher percentage of their income – but would at least be preferable to isolating blame against already marginalised communities.
Stigmas only serve to limit social mobility. A worker who smokes outside, on his own break time, will be judged disproportionately to the harm he is actually causing others, and may suffer as a result. Similar trends occur in dating; people who are okay with a partner who smokes are more likely to be from socioeconomic backgrounds where smoking is common. Again, recognising that those communities are most often poor ones, this seems a dangerous and unhelpful precedent to accept.
Drug abuse and misuse pervades the entire national culture, and legislative solutions need to recognise that fact. Mr Varadkar deserves credit for taking the issue seriously, but enthusiasm is no excuse for poor policy. The only way to move forward as a nation is to equally shoulder the blame.
