Scottish Churches Parliamentary Office, Edinburgh - Briefing Document Sixteen

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Briefing Document No 16 - Page 3 of 5

Alcohol Misuse - Continued

(B) Scottish Parliament Debate
Following an earlier Members Debate on a motion from Donald Gorrie, there was a full Parliamentary debate on alcohol misuse on 7 December 2000, around the motion "That the Parliament endorses the Executive's plans to work towards the publication of a national action plan to tackle alcohol misuse". Not surprisingly there was support for this motion, and MSPs had a lot to contribute. Rounding up the debate, Iain Gray said "Keir Hardie, stood on a four-point platform 100 years ago: the first three points were a Scottish Parliament, reform of the House of Lords and a guaranteed wage, all of which the current Labour Government has delivered. The punch line is that Keir Hardie's fourth election pledge was temperance. We will not deliver on that … I make that point lightly, but with the serious intent of underlining the fact that alcohol - its effects, its control and its production - is a strand that has always run through reformist Scottish politics".

Two underlying issues emerged from the debate - funding and the mammoth task of changing attitudes towards the consumption of alcohol.

1. Statistics
MSPs quoted a great deal of statistical evidence to demonstrate the gravity of alcohol misuse:
(a) an estimated 200,000 people in Scotland misuse alcohol
(b) 1 in 5 people in Scotland worry about their own or someone else's drinking
(c) at least 85,000 children in Scotland live with a problem drinker
(d) 75% of stabbings, 65% of murders, 56% of fire fatalities, 52% of wife battering cases, 50% of rapes, 41% of assaults and muggings and 25% of road deaths are alcohol related
(e) 1 in 5 of all violent crime take place in and around licensed premises
(f) 14 million working days are lost every year because of alcohol related problems
(g) the cost to industry is at least £2 billion
(h) 25% of accidents at work involve workers who misuse alcohol
(i) £180 million is the estimated annual cost of hospital treatment for alcohol-related illnesses in Scotland
(j) 1 in 7 acute hospital admissions relates to the misuse of alcohol
(k) an estimated 3,000 people a year die an alcohol related death (ten times the number who die from taking illicit drugs). The official figure for Scotland in 1999 was 1,103 alcohol related deaths compared to 340 drug related deaths.
(l) 40% of 13 to 14 year olds were drunk when they first had sexual intercourse, leading to unsafe sex 2. Funding Anomaly between Drug and Alcohol Misuse
One of the first and recurring issues that MSPs raised was that of funding. They welcomed the allocation of the £2.5 million over a period of three years for the development of the alcohol misuse strategy but argued that this was not enough and more funding would have to be made available for preventive work and service provision. They expressed concern at the lack of resources available for alcohol-specific projects, particularly in light of the money allocated to drug abuse. The Executive directly spent £1.3 million in 1999-2000 to address alcohol misuse but in the same period allotted the much larger sum of £143.5 million to be spent over three years on measures to tackle drug abuse.

MSPs welcomed the money spent on drug abuse but felt that there should be a matching commitment to alcohol misuse recognising that it is a much bigger problem. The statistics demonstrated that more people die from alcohol misuse than they do from drugs. The official 1999 figures reveal a huge difference between alcohol- and drug-related deaths - 1,103 alcohol-related deaths compared to 340 drug-related deaths. It is estimated that there are between 30,000 and 40,000 drug injectors in Scotland but 200,000 problem drinkers. The proper services and resources needed to cope with alcohol misuse require appropriate funding and that is currently not there.