Readers of academic journal Addiction will have become rampant eurosceptics after perusing a recent article by Rebecca Gordon and Peter Anderson entitled “Science and alcohol policy: a case study of the EU Strategy on Alcohol”. I didn’t know that the EU had a strategy on booze, but the bloc has a habit of launching “strategies” with variable amounts of substance. In this case, the EU Council asked the European Commission to devise a strategy on reducing alcohol-related harm. The Commission published a Communication on the subject in 2006. Is it any good?
Although the Communication acknowledges and supports existing interventions which have high evidence for effectiveness, such as enforcing blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limits for drivers, it extensively promotes other interventions which have been shown to be ineffective; for example, recommending education and persuasion strategies as a measure across all its five priority areas.
In other words, dear readers, the Commission is boosting policies that don’t work.
Measures to influence price are mentioned only once in relation to sales in drinking venues limiting two-for-one drinks offers. Measures to control physical availability are mentioned infrequently.
It doesn’t really sound like the Commission’s heart was in it…
It also focuses its efforts more on mapping member state actions and coordinating knowledge exchange than on providing concrete recommendations for action or developing Europe-wide policy measures. This may be a compromise between the rights of Member States to develop national policy and legislation and the obligation of the European Union as a collaborative body to protect health.
So this is all about sovereignty and subsidiarity? Not quite…
Furthermore, it has been suggested that the European Union’s roots as a trading block emphasizes collaboration with industry stakeholders and this influences the ability to prioritize health over trade considerations.
Who might these powerful “industry stakeholders” be? I have a faint idea, as I once had a brush with them myself. Late last year, I co-authored a piece in the European Voice with Sushant K. Singh on the EU’s relations with India. We noted that efforts to sign off on an EU-India free trade agreement had been held up by disputes over liquor tariffs, and expressed surprise that a potentially important strategic relationship was being complicated by the price of booze. Soon afterwards, a representative of the European Spirits Organisation wrote a sniffy letter to the European Voice arguing that “that spirits are the EU’s most important agri-food export (worth €5.7 billion in 2009).”
I am told that EU-China relations are similarly complicated by the interventions of the, er, liquid lobbyists in Brussels on liquor tariff issues. I’m all for boosting agri-food exports, of course. But one would think that the EU could at least set aside “trade considerations” when it comes to stopping its citizens drinking themselves to death.
