Health Secretary to persevere with minimum pricing policy

The Health Secretary has not given up on minimum pricing. Not that I've got anything against a fighter, but it's hard to see the merits of a system where alcohol in Scotland is priced higher than its larger neighbour over the border: a border, moreover, that has no border controls. BBC reporter Brian Taylor's summary of the arguments and counter-arguments says that the main argument in favour is the support expressed by health service leaders and the police: not very persuasive against the arguments put forward by opponents to minimum pricing (it's really not enough to say that important people agree with you).

For me the Achilles heel was the claim that:

In the first year of such a policy, there would be 50 fewer deaths, 1,200 fewer hospital admissions, 400 fewer violent crimes and millions of pounds saved in healthcare ... 

Their claims are much less extravagant than they were prior to the smoking ban when it was claimed that 1,000 lives would be saved in Glasgow alone: in England an estimate in 2007 came in at 11,000 lives a year. Later that year back in Scotland we had Jill Pell announcing 17 per cent fewer heart attack admissions in the first year of the ban (never repeated, which is possibly why she had had to move on to another condition). Mortality statistics for Scotland reveal a steady decline in total mortality since 1999 and earlier (peaking in 1989 at nearly 34,000), steepest at 2003/4, rising slightly at 2007, and declining since.* Figures for the Glasgow area show nothing to support a claim that 1,000 fewer people have died every year since the smoking ban came in, hovering at 6.5 to 7.5K per year for both men and women.**

Saving fifty lives by comparison is quite a modest prediction, if hard to verify, but 400 fewer violent crimes and 1,200 fewer hospitalisations is hard to believe. How they come up with these figures is anybody's guess.
Whatever the legislation is meant to tackle, whether chronic drinking or anti-social behaviour, it won't help the situation if it turns out that the people causing the trouble are not mostly at the bottom of the economic heap, but it will hurt them just the same.

Tables from General Register Office for Scotland
*Deaths, by sex and age groups, Scotland, 1901 to 2009
**Deaths by sex, year and (post-April 2006) NHS Board area, 1991 to 2009

Saving Lives

ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Scotland today celebrates the news that the public supports 'legislation to support the country's tobacco-related death toll'. Their press release, describing polls which apparently give anti-tobacco a ringing endorsement, declares full public support for all anti-tobacco measures including the tobacco display ban (pending the results of a Court judgement). Sheila Duffy declares:

There is much we can do to reduce the 13,500 deaths caused by smoking each year, prevent young people starting, and help smokers to quit. 

Her figure for smoking related deaths should be noted. I am not clear how these figures are gathered. Another piece of writing from 2004 looks forward to the ban. In it, Dr Mac Armstrong declares that it would save 1,000 lives a year in Glasgow alone. The toll for 'estimated' smoking-related deaths at 13,000, however, is lower than the one supplied by Sheila Duffy, two years before the ban came in.


Both figures have in fact been floating around for the last few years, but there is no sign of 1,000 lives a year being saved. (Whether by coincidence or not, this figure was also given as the toll of passive smokers killed every year by secondary smoke: the ones the legislation was meant to protect.) And let's not forget this story, that heart attack rates went down 17 per cent following the smoking ban: now made nonsense by the fact that the English are claiming only a 2.4 per drop in heart attacks as a result of the smoking ban.


It is not known exactly most people die, and it is impossible to come up with precise numbers for a potential factor in a death, like smoking. What is certain is that the smoking ban hasn't dramatically altered the death rate in any of the ways we were led to believe it would.