Dr Peter Rice (Scotsman letters, 25 March) claims that thousands of jobs have been lost in the pub trade due to the "cost-driven shift to home drinking".
How precisely is this quantified? The price differential between off- and on-sales was obvious even when I started drinking around 30 years ago, and if it has increased since then it's surely difficult to extricate other factors encouraging home consumption, most obviously the more recent ban on smoking in pubs.
Indeed, despite comparisons often drawn between the minimum pricing proposal and the smoking ban, presumably the latter has been detrimental to health in that it has encouraged home drinking and thus greater consumption due to cheaper prices?
Also, it should be underlined that the smoking ban has had little effect on the proportion of the population smoking, thus the health benefits must be limited, unless the passive smoking of consenting adults in pubs is deemed more significant than the likes of children in the invigorated home drinking/smoking environment.
Of course, the health lobby is now targeting the latter scenario, but I wonder what the next unintended consequences will be?
(Sent as a letter to the Scotsman. Note that my recent link to Scottish Government statistics on the proportion of adults smoking was not to the most recent figures, which can be found here. Figure 10.1 shows that the long-term downward trend accelerated slightly when the ban was introduced, but the limited benefit of this was largely reversed the year after when the proportion increased slightly. But it's obvious that the ban has had negligible effect on the proportion of adults smoking. The earlier link has been updated.)
On the English Question...
8 hours ago
3 comments:
fortunatly, in my area of Chicago, there are enough bars ignoring the ban to keep kids from gagging from smoke at home.
Smoking Bans are bad for Children. Smoking and drinking at home is now the order of the day. It’s cheaper and more of it is being done around Children. Smoking and Drinking are now being done at home but the Anti’s have plans to stop even that. Some are trying to get laws passed to have Smoking at home and in cars listed as Child abuse. This is being used to remove children from homes of smoking parents. John Q public has been lied to for so long it is now easy to demonize smokers no matter were they smoke. Inside or outside, someone will put a stop to it. What you will find is a lot of crying about smell. Where are the bodies? Of all the pollutants we are subjected to daily, SHS is the least toxic. It’s just the most profitable for the Pharmaceuticals who sell Smoking Cessation NRT’s. Why is anyone over thirty alive today? Everyone alive today has lived in SHS. Big Pharma doesn’t care about Children. They care about PROFIT.
Thanks for the comments, sorry for the delay in replying.
Anon 1
Indeed, and I wouldn't be surprised if according to officialdom everything is whiter than white, whereas the reality is often a bit different.
Please see my blog post later this morning for some thoughts on this and related issues.
Anon 2
Yes, interesting comment from a health official in the local press, who seemed to support a ban everywhere except for private residences on the basis that that couldn't be enforced.
Thus that would mean more smoking at home and therefore more exposure to children. But of course that wouldn't matter because the political gesture would have been made.
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