Karinofnine – Member

I think the government should be wondering why people want/need to regularly get off their tits on drink or drugs.

You write as if we haven’t been getting bent for thousands of years. 😆

Except we have been getting bent for thousands of years.
Tens of thousands of years.
Almost certainly hundreds of thousands of years.
And possibly *millions of years.
💡

*I appreciate that millions of years ago our ancestors weren’t exactly the same species, before the pedants jump in.

A junkie isn’t generally much of a bother when he’s got his fix (relatively, anyway), it’s when he’s run out that it impacts every bugger else.

Maybe you have not lived in the close vicinity of a junkie.Or just as bad an “alky”.They can make everyone’s life a nightmare.

Smokers aren’t paying the stonking amounts of tax they used to. Easy access to duty free nailed that one

Where is this easy access to duty free goods available from ?

Couple of hundred cigarettes and a litre of spirits once or twice a year. Hardly going to put much of a dent in the tax takings off cigarettes and booze.

I think 50p / unit to be totally acceptable. Would stop alot of liggers from being able to spend their benefit money on booze

Nah. Remember the Tories new ‘Universal Benefit’ means that housing benefit gets paid directly to the claimant, rather than the landlord. So they’ll have miles more money to spend on booze and fags

Smokers aren’t paying the stonking amounts of tax they used to. Easy access to duty free nailed that one

Where is this easy access to duty free goods available from ?

Yip. As a smoker, with friends who are also smokers, I can vouch for that statement being utter and complete cobblers

a ban on below cost selling would seem to me to be a better way of controlling price

They tried this, and when you’re dealing with organisations with the purchasing power of the major supermarkets it’s actually quite difficult to define ‘cost price’, as they pretty much dictate it.

This is the problem, if someone is determined enough to do something then they’re going to do it. An alcoholic isn’t going to stop buying vodka just because it’s gone up two bob; when it gets to a point where they can’t pay for it, they’ll forego something else like (say) food, They’ll steal for it or they’ll get dodgy imports from a bloke in the pub.

And this is what makes drugs such as Heroin so dangerous, both to health and socially. If desperate alcoholics are priced out of buying regular booze, they will resort to irregular booze, which will inevitably be far more dangerous. I dare say some unscrupulous types were gearing up to produce cheap moonshine in preparation for the price limit introduction. Which would have added yet another layer of crime.

I think the government should be wondering why people want/need to regularly get off their tits on drink or drugs.

Exactly.

Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an alcohol problem. Maybe Islam is the answer.

FT has an interesting article on this today

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f2934780-8b24-11e2-8fcf-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2NVWjijqP