Alcohol Related Violence: The solution Could Not Be Increasing The Alcohol Price

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Alcohol relatd violence
Alcohol related violence
Evidence suggests that alcohol abuse is related to large amount of violence in the UK. Road rage and street fights on Friday and Saturday nights are some of such crimes. Controlling alcohol abuse therefore can help reduce these crimes. Policy makers and lobbying groups in the UK are proposing increment in alcohol price as a way of tackling this alcohol problem. However, this proposal is unfair and may be counter-productive.

The advocates of alcohol price increment are either high earners such as government ministers, doctors or teetotallers who do not drink alcohol. Any increment in alcohol price will not affect them. The people who will be affected by this alcohol price increment are not just alcohol manufacturing companies as claimed by advocates of alcohol price increment. They also include the vast majority of low paid citizens who consume alcohol sensibly. For these people, consuming alcohol is one of the coping mechanisms for dealing with difficult and stressful life. Taking this privilege away from these consumers through price increment is not fair.

Besides, increasing alcohol price may not help to reduce the so-called alcohol related violence. A major reason given by advocates of alcohol price increment is that low alcohol price and too much consumption of the beverage is attributable to high levels of violence. Therefore, increasing the alcohol price will dramatically reduce alcohol abuse and subsequent violence.

However, the vast majority of people who consume alcohol are law abiding and do not commit violent crime after consuming the beverage. Otherwise the authority will be in trouble and cannot control alcohol related crimes by this group. The tiny percentage of the population that binge drink and commit violence are largely alcohol addicts. They cannot do without the beverage. If alcohol price is increased, these people are likely to forfeit other essential things such as food to feed their alcohol habit. In addition, they can resort to criminal activities to sustain their alcohol addiction. This is likely to increase alcohol related violence rather than decrease it.

Therefore, increasing alcohol price to solve alcohol related violence may have the unintended consequences. It may impact heavily on low paid and law abiding citizens who drink responsibly. In contrast, it may not have serious impact on alcohol abusers who may resort to different options to sustain their alcohol habit.   Before increasing the burden of the less well-offs in society through this alcohol pricing, policy makers should first think of other means of controlling alcohol related violence.

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