I’ve had my problems with drink. Don’t touch the stuff now – if I do, it never goes well for anyone.
In my heavy drinking days, I can’t say that a minimum price would have ever put me off. If you’re addicted to the stuff in some way, you don’t really care what it costs – in every sense, financial, emotional, whatever.
I just think the government don’t really know what to do about it, 24h licensing was meant to give us a European drinking culture instead of the British binge drinking culture, but that didn’t work, so they’re now attempting to make it effectively too expensive for poor people to drink – how wonderfully simplistic, because of course it’s poor people getting drunk that’s the problem isn’t it 🙄 nice middle and upper class people, they can be trusted with alcohol can’t they? They’re educated and responsible and only drink moderately within government guidelines….no silent epidemic of functional alcoholism among the middle classes at all.
But the middle and upper classes can pay for their own rehab and generally keep their problems away from the social workers, so I guess it’s not the government’s problem if those kinds of drinkers don’t cost them money.