They made a rule in the Netherlands that stops supermarkets for throwing discounts on alcohol.
I'm always amazed just how cheap beer is, even cheaper than some mineral water brands.
My dad, born in the 50s in northern France says that near beer was more ubiquitous for kids than water when he was growing up. Part of it was that the ever so slight fermentation of even near beer made it safer to drink than water from who knew where. I never checked the validity of this story, but it's fun to think about.
It doesn't really surprise me though that cheap beer would be cheaper than mineral water brands, most of their costs have to be bottling and transport and marketing. The product itself, is probably one of the cheaper parts.
I truly struggle (in the US) to find 12oz glass-bottled sparkling water that's cheaper than some beers sold in 12oz glass bottles. One might think the glass is making it expensive, due to the weight, but then why are some beers in glass cheaper? It seems like, at worst, non-famous sparkling water ought to cost slightly less than the beer does, but it's typically about the same or a little higher, something like $1.15 or $1.20 per bottle purchased in quantities of 15 (and more like $2 or more purchased in singles!)
(why not buy larger bottles? I prefer small ones because I don't always want to drink an entire 750ml of fizzy water in a single day, and it goes flat if left overnight; I do buy plastic sometimes but the discount over glass is so tiny that it's not really meaningful, and I prefer glass, both due to vague uneasiness with plastic and because if I end up drinking out of the bottle rather than a cup, glass bottles feel nicer than plastic)
What I buy's usually Mexican (hard to find it much cheaper, at least around here) and I don't think they're only putting it in glass for US yuppies.
Seltzer often tastes gross, I'll get canned club soda if I want cheap bubbles and just don't give a fuck about plastic or whatever at the moment (cans are lined in plastic). Trouble is, the bubbly-water fad has made that shit a lot more expensive than it used to be. Could get it for like $0.20/can for a long time, now it's a lot higher and you have to hunt to find the plain version without a bunch of artificial flavor in it.
Seltzer and club soda are different products; club soda has sodium added (if it naturally has a high mineral content, then it is called mineral water instead of club soda.) Seltzer on the other hand is simply carbonated tap water. Personally I used to prefer seltzer but now drink plain tap water. For each their own though.
> Bottled water in glass bottles is a luxury good for yuppies in America. Store-brand seltzer water bottled in plastic is about $1 per liter.
I think in some countries, water in glass bottles not a yuppie luxury product because they actually reuse (not recycle) the bottles. Sort of like what they used to do with milk in the US.
And with seltzer! You can still get it delivered in glass bottles where I live[1].
(It's more expensive than store-bought plastic bottles but about the same price as store-bought glass, with the added advantage that I know they reuse the bottles.)
Used to do it with soda in the US, too. I remember pint bottles lined up by the door to return to the grocery store to be refilled, which system survived some places at least into the early '90s (I know because some relatives were still doing it that late).
Glass = yuppie... shit, I guess it's because I'm getting old and remember a time when glass was just for everyone, but that's a really weird sentiment to me. Is Coors yuppie if it's in glass bottles? Seems like this is a selective application of that notion.
That seems like a poor comparison to make the point, since bottled mineral water is notoriously overpriced, particularly the "high end" brands.
How does it compare to something with relatively standard prices like milk? In the US, particularly cheap beer for broke alcoholics might be $5 for a sixpack of cans, 2.1 L or approximately $2.5 per liter. Milk is something like $4 per gallon, or about $1.10 per liter. Much cheaper than the cheapest beer.
Light beer and wine have been preferable drinks if not life-savers even for minors in most of Europe since at least medieval times because of the antibiotic/sterilizing effect compared to tap water.
I never even disagreed to the conclusion about reduced alcohol related deaths, friend. Not only am I not skeptical of the study, I completely acknowledge the results. The study never tried to disprove substitutive effects of intoxicant use, which is what I am pointing out.
What intoxicants are cheaper than alcohol? The only one that comes to mind is cannabis, and if people are ditching alcohol for cannabis I think that will surely save lives.
Increasing the cost of alcohol not only decreases the relative cost of cheaper substances, it also decreases the relative cost of more expensive substances.
Do you actually have evidence that alcoholics are switching to paint huffing, or is this just speculation?
Alcoholism is unusual among addictions in that it's (1) largely invisible until its end state and (2) minimally taboo when it occurs in "high-functioning" individuals. Huffing chemicals is neither of those things, nor is swallowing mouthwash (which is more likely to make you sick than drunk at the quantities an average adult would need.)
I don't think alcohol abuse is that fungible with other drug abuse. People probably do switch, but it's hard to imagine that every alcoholic who reduces their drinking by so-and-so much increases, say, heroin use by an equivalent amount (in terms of expected mortality).
It seems that counting alcohol sales in addition to deaths could be useful information to show, assuming pricing out the low end was the theoretical model to reduce high volume consumers. I have no idea if any of that's the actual mechanism, or if the study looked at it since the linked article is very sparse.
I don't think I've said anything that suggests I disbelieve what the study said about decreased alcohol related deaths. So sure, I believe that positive result.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_effect . Yes nothing else is a perfect substitute for alcohol (some benzos are close though), but other substances are imperfect substitutes to become intoxicated. Substances substitution is a prevalent theme in drug abuse.
I disagree with their phrasing, but I tend to question positive or negative results. That way I can understand the data and how that fits into the overall system.
For example, it seems a lot of this study took place during the pandemic. Seeing the data on a year by year basis and understanding other possible effects of behavior would be good. It's not necessarily to disprove anything, but it could serve to strengthen position.
The way the linked article is written, it's like saying "I have a green marble in this box". You have no reason to doubt me and I have no reason to lie. But you're going to believe me more if I let you look in the box. Who knows, maybe I'm colorblind and it's actually red.
Drug related deaths kept rising after the minimum unit pricing. But they were raising pretty consistently before that though. A quick Google shows that they're finally plateauing now, which is great.
The confidence is pretty high, I find it a bit off putting.
> The methods we’ve used in this study allow us to be confident that the reduction in alcohol health harms we’ve shown is due to the introduction of MUP, rather than some other factor.
It's just too confident of a statement in my eyes. Whenever I read things like this, I'm immediately skeptical and beging questioning the motivations.
On a sidenote, I wonder if these changes made a noticeable difference when it comes to the Glasgow effect[0].
Is this because less people consumed alcohol due to cost? A percentage means nothing without the underlying data. Most of this is behind a paywall so I can't find their study.
Study: Banning alcohol linked to 99% drop in alcohol-related deaths.
The article says 150 fewer deaths. So about 1150 deaths a year down to 1000 deaths per year. But I too would be interested to see the other causes of death during that time, especially what controls were put in place given most of this study would have taken place during the pandemic.
Sure but be careful with the price increases. At some point, bootlegging/smuggling becomes worthwhile. Happened with cigarettes in Canada (organized by the tobacco industry):
Heard much the same about weed; often cheaper to buy from a local, uh, "specialist" than get nailed for higher taxes at retailers.
20 years ago your local specialist was had a lot of risk, too. Cops, guns, general shadiness, etc. Now most cops DGAF for anything under giant quantities, and even then it's a regulatory thing, so they're not tracking down the local weedman. No risk, and better prices.
Tobacco in Canada is a complex subject. While I agree the infamously high prices of cigarettes in Canada go into play, I would argue that tax exempt cigarettes quotas in reserves[0] and the overall lack of oversight in Reserves creates a perfect haven for contraband, distribution of tax-free cigarettes and "indian smokes".
its sad how the Indian Act is still in effect today and how politically impossible the situation is.
I think that countries without these huge loopholes might see less problems from bootlegging
as we see here.
Don't really have any data to base this thought on, but it seems like there could be a (positive?) feedback loop - at least from the standpoint of legal players within a heavily taxed industry - where if high taxes were then used to prevent illegal players (bootleggers/smuggling) from entering the market of enforcing the existing laws.
That way instead of general tax payers funding enforcement, it's the direct beneficiaries of the enforcement who are funding the effort. And they can decide how much they want to tax themselves.
Alcohol is severely physically addictive and people can die from withdrawal directly. Another framing could be “force the poor to steal or commit other crimes to obtain alcohol”
We've got something similar in Ireland, Alcohol min price is 10c/ml.
Subjectively, It's wiped out bottles of wine < 8 eur, pushed Guinness can prices up about 25%, and dropped the sizes of cheap ass spirits from 750/40% to 500/37.5% at the same 15 eur price point. (this at Lidl, which is always a low price consistent enough quality). IPAs and other high proof beers are starting to come in smaller cans so they're not more than 2eur each. I never paid attention to the 2l strong cider, but I think that was a primary target.
Up north, just over the border, you can get 1L Bacardi 40% for about 20£. In France, the 3 eur wine can be ok, and rum is damn cheap, to the point in coming in 3L boxes. There are tetra-pack wines in Spain at 1 eur(absolute crap, but distill well). And then there are the 3l/10Eur jugs of Tokaji Furmint in Hungary (ok, and distills very well).
Conservatives bitch and moan about people on food stamps buying junk food all the damn time, but don't actually want to do anything about it because a sizeable portion of their base is on food stamps and likes junk food and would be upset if they actually put restrictions on it. Also foodstamps are meant to be a handout to farmers and food producers anyway so limiting purchases might go against that goal.
You would want to know how many deaths which would otherwise have been recorded as alcohol related, were actually recorded as entirely covid related in this period.
I don't see a link to the study (an unforgivable oversight in every case) but it's a good call out to consider the pandemic when we're talking about those years. There was a solid decade of people brutally abusing data from around the Great Recession without calling out that everything was absolutely bonkers due to the Great Recession. It'll be even worse with data around the pandemic years because people would rather score their points than just be fucking honest.
I’m curious how this impacted withdrawal-related deaths. Alcohol is incredibly physically addictive and is one of a handful of commonly abused drugs that are lethally dangerous to withdraw from in an uncontrolled manner.
One way of staving off the lethal effects of delirium tremens is to take benzodiazepines (which are also highly addictive and can be fatal to withdraw from) or opioids (which are at least equally as ruinous as alcohol).
I always hope that the people involved in drafting these one-size-fits-all solutions to complex medical and social issues have some sort of first-hand knowledge of physical addiction. Sadly it’s usually puritanical politicians looking for a boost in approval ratings, or equally puritanical academics looking to gain clout. Real humans be damned!
one would imagine that a price floor of £5 for a 2L (4.5 pints) bottle of cider wouldn't prevent many people from being able to purchase it to literally save their life. It would however, help people think twice about going through multiple of them a day?
I am usually quite sympathetic to the plight of addicts and the poor regulation and political environment around it but having lived in the UK for years ive only really heard good stuff about this. It's really not a high price point, it cuts out the really nasty stuff only.
My point is that people literally don’t “think twice” about things that they are addicted to. Price tends to change behavior in other ways, like maybe they’ll steal it if they can’t afford it.
Source: Over a decade clean. I personally watched a family member seize, fall, and fatally hit his head on the sidewalk. A close friend saw the same happen to his grandfather, though it was a coffee table not a sidewalk.
Both of them had a BAC of 0, so their deaths would not have been ruled alcohol-related even though they were both directly caused by acute alcohol withdrawal.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] thread(why not buy larger bottles? I prefer small ones because I don't always want to drink an entire 750ml of fizzy water in a single day, and it goes flat if left overnight; I do buy plastic sometimes but the discount over glass is so tiny that it's not really meaningful, and I prefer glass, both due to vague uneasiness with plastic and because if I end up drinking out of the bottle rather than a cup, glass bottles feel nicer than plastic)
Seltzer often tastes gross, I'll get canned club soda if I want cheap bubbles and just don't give a fuck about plastic or whatever at the moment (cans are lined in plastic). Trouble is, the bubbly-water fad has made that shit a lot more expensive than it used to be. Could get it for like $0.20/can for a long time, now it's a lot higher and you have to hunt to find the plain version without a bunch of artificial flavor in it.
I think in some countries, water in glass bottles not a yuppie luxury product because they actually reuse (not recycle) the bottles. Sort of like what they used to do with milk in the US.
(It's more expensive than store-bought plastic bottles but about the same price as store-bought glass, with the added advantage that I know they reuse the bottles.)
[1]: https://www.brooklynseltzerboys.com/
Glass = yuppie... shit, I guess it's because I'm getting old and remember a time when glass was just for everyone, but that's a really weird sentiment to me. Is Coors yuppie if it's in glass bottles? Seems like this is a selective application of that notion.
Bottled water in glass specifically.
That seems like a poor comparison to make the point, since bottled mineral water is notoriously overpriced, particularly the "high end" brands.
How does it compare to something with relatively standard prices like milk? In the US, particularly cheap beer for broke alcoholics might be $5 for a sixpack of cans, 2.1 L or approximately $2.5 per liter. Milk is something like $4 per gallon, or about $1.10 per liter. Much cheaper than the cheapest beer.
Reality: We raised the price so people shifted to more black market drugs that didn't show up in this particular study!
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Commenter is not only skeptical without evidence, but hostile to the conclusion. Mocks the effort.
You login to play victim to a crime committed in your mind.
Alcoholism is unusual among addictions in that it's (1) largely invisible until its end state and (2) minimally taboo when it occurs in "high-functioning" individuals. Huffing chemicals is neither of those things, nor is swallowing mouthwash (which is more likely to make you sick than drunk at the quantities an average adult would need.)
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_effect . Yes nothing else is a perfect substitute for alcohol (some benzos are close though), but other substances are imperfect substitutes to become intoxicated. Substances substitution is a prevalent theme in drug abuse.
For example, it seems a lot of this study took place during the pandemic. Seeing the data on a year by year basis and understanding other possible effects of behavior would be good. It's not necessarily to disprove anything, but it could serve to strengthen position.
The way the linked article is written, it's like saying "I have a green marble in this box". You have no reason to doubt me and I have no reason to lie. But you're going to believe me more if I let you look in the box. Who knows, maybe I'm colorblind and it's actually red.
The confidence is pretty high, I find it a bit off putting.
> The methods we’ve used in this study allow us to be confident that the reduction in alcohol health harms we’ve shown is due to the introduction of MUP, rather than some other factor.
It's just too confident of a statement in my eyes. Whenever I read things like this, I'm immediately skeptical and beging questioning the motivations.
On a sidenote, I wonder if these changes made a noticeable difference when it comes to the Glasgow effect[0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_effect
Study: Banning alcohol linked to 99% drop in alcohol-related deaths.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/tobacco-firms-to-pay-550m-ove...
20 years ago your local specialist was had a lot of risk, too. Cops, guns, general shadiness, etc. Now most cops DGAF for anything under giant quantities, and even then it's a regulatory thing, so they're not tracking down the local weedman. No risk, and better prices.
its sad how the Indian Act is still in effect today and how politically impossible the situation is.
I think that countries without these huge loopholes might see less problems from bootlegging as we see here.
0:https://www.ontario.ca/document/tobacco-tax/first-nations-ci...
That way instead of general tax payers funding enforcement, it's the direct beneficiaries of the enforcement who are funding the effort. And they can decide how much they want to tax themselves.
> the policy, which means a standard bottle of whisky (700ml) must cost at least £14 and a two-litre bottle of cider £5
This only ever had any impact on pricing at the _very_ cheap end of alcohol.
Subjectively, It's wiped out bottles of wine < 8 eur, pushed Guinness can prices up about 25%, and dropped the sizes of cheap ass spirits from 750/40% to 500/37.5% at the same 15 eur price point. (this at Lidl, which is always a low price consistent enough quality). IPAs and other high proof beers are starting to come in smaller cans so they're not more than 2eur each. I never paid attention to the 2l strong cider, but I think that was a primary target.
Up north, just over the border, you can get 1L Bacardi 40% for about 20£. In France, the 3 eur wine can be ok, and rum is damn cheap, to the point in coming in 3L boxes. There are tetra-pack wines in Spain at 1 eur(absolute crap, but distill well). And then there are the 3l/10Eur jugs of Tokaji Furmint in Hungary (ok, and distills very well).
The Scottish one is 5p/ml (roughly 6c/ml over the last five years), so significantly lower.
Actually, I'll be curious to see if there are fewer broken bottles and can litter in some of the well known drinking spots come summer.
Reducing people's ability to buy alcohol linked to less alcohol consumption.
Is that even remotely surprising?
One way of staving off the lethal effects of delirium tremens is to take benzodiazepines (which are also highly addictive and can be fatal to withdraw from) or opioids (which are at least equally as ruinous as alcohol).
I always hope that the people involved in drafting these one-size-fits-all solutions to complex medical and social issues have some sort of first-hand knowledge of physical addiction. Sadly it’s usually puritanical politicians looking for a boost in approval ratings, or equally puritanical academics looking to gain clout. Real humans be damned!
I am usually quite sympathetic to the plight of addicts and the poor regulation and political environment around it but having lived in the UK for years ive only really heard good stuff about this. It's really not a high price point, it cuts out the really nasty stuff only.
Source: Over a decade clean. I personally watched a family member seize, fall, and fatally hit his head on the sidewalk. A close friend saw the same happen to his grandfather, though it was a coffee table not a sidewalk.
Both of them had a BAC of 0, so their deaths would not have been ruled alcohol-related even though they were both directly caused by acute alcohol withdrawal.
/sarcasm