Introduction

Chapter Six identified efforts to morally regulate drinking within law and public discourse relating to crime and disorder in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and found that these efforts were/are, to some degree, shaped by Victorian temperance attitudes. Along with crime and disorder, the other major social problem associated with alcohol in contemporary society is ill-health. Alcohol is consistently connected to a variety of health problems, including liver disease, heart disease, pancreatitis, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) and certain types of cancer. Such forms of harm are associated with any forms of excessive consumption but especially with alcoholism, whose sufferers are usually defined by their habitual, compulsive or uncontrolled drinking. To deal with some of these problems, there has been: a promotion of abstinence from alcohol for young people under the age of 15; experiments with bans on super-strength beer and cider; demands for forceful clampdowns on the number of licensed premises entirely in so-called ‘binge towns’; calls for a total ban on all alcohol advertising and sponsorship; enhanced monitoring of patients’ drinking by GPs; and most prominently, persistent campaigns for the imposition of a minimum unit price to reduce the affordability of alcoholic drinks.

The significance and prevalence of alcohol-related health problems has been a magnetic topic for public debate and regulatory projects in recent years. Interestingly, public discourse on alcohol and health has been increasingly shaped by a variety of campaign groups, including public health organisations and professional medical bodies. Minimum unit pricing (MUP), in particular, has been tirelessly promoted by such groups. The prominence of doctors, surgeons and epidemiologists within this health-focused discourse might imply that a more evidencebased approach to the social problem of alcohol, disconnected from the moralistic attitudes of the past, is emerging. Such a transformation would be consistent with the apparent triumph of the harm-based libertarianism of Hart over the legal moralism of Devlin in the 1960s, described in Chapter Five. It would also resonate with the macro picture of social change painted by sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, in which the rise of a social order dominated by rational, secular assessments of catastrophic risk serves to sideline more traditional moral considerations.