Steve was telling me about the
delusional behaviour of the drink dependent person – the alcoholic, as he
refers to himself. Not, he was quick to point out, a recovered alcoholic. Once
an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. In his view, you can’t risk relaxing and
then relapsing. You need to be on constant guard.
At various times Steve had convinced
himself that he could be a normal drinker. He would venture into his local pub
and have a pint, then sit there all night trying not to think about a second
pint. Having successfully reached last orders, he’d go home satisfied that his
consumption of alcohol was under control.
But on the second night he would be the last to leave the pub having
drank steadily all evening. By the end of the week, raging at the bar staff for
refusing to serve him, his final ignominious departure was often assisted by
the police. By now, out of control, he would buy six-packs of super-strength
lager to drink at home. He preferred Tennent’s Super although the taste was
irrelevant because he was now only drinking to achieve inebriation as quickly
as possible and with an 8% or 9% Alcohol by Volume (ABV) content, cans of
super-strength lager represent the most effective short-cut to oblivion.
Around six weeks later Steve would
emerge from his bender. By now the
carpet of his living room would be submerged by the contents of overflowing
ash-trays, half eaten takeaways, broken crockery and dozens of super-strength
lager cans. And from this nadir he would wearily take a shower, trying in vain
to soap away the feeling of self-hatred, bracing himself to charge up his phone
to see if there were any messages from his family; hoping that they might have
noticed his absence yet grateful that they hadn’t found him lying on the floor
in his own piss.
Steve hasn’t had a drink for 15
months. He is a volunteer at a project supporting homeless people and keeping
furiously busy. This time he thinks he won’t relapse and his clear-eyed
self-awareness makes me feel instinctively that he will succeed this time around.
The devastation wreaked by high
strength ciders and lagers on the lives of homeless men and women is
extraordinary and intolerable – except that we tolerate it. The strength and
the cheapness is a fatal combination. A three-litre bottle of high strength (7.5%)
white cider can cost as little as £3.50 and contains the same amount of alcohol
as 22 shots of vodka. Nationally, these drinks cut swathes through a population
of alcohol-dependent, highly vulnerable men and woman, a ghoulish harvest to
which we are in danger of becoming desensitised. Statistics from a recent
internal report focusing on four Thames Reach hostels for former rough sleepers
records that of the 15 hostel residents who died during the year, twelve died
from health problems related to alcohol or alcohol combined with drug misuse.
The average age of death was 52.
These reports, collated from
contemporaneous records written over the year make grim reading: ‘P was a heavy
drinker and had severe physical frailty. P was found unresponsive in his room.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation was done on him until the paramedics came but
nothing could save him’. The dominant, ubiquitous grip of high strength lagers
and ciders cannot be understated. In this same report it was noted that for 88%
of dependent drinkers in our hostels these were the drinks of choice or, as one
of my colleagues sourly put it, the drinks of bondage.
Some months back we received a visit
to one of our hostels from a senior executive at Aston Manor, the company which
produces Frosty Jack’s, a best-selling high strength white cider. Thames Reach,
alongside other charities supporting people with alcohol dependency problems
has been campaigning to secure an increase in the price of high strength lagers
and ciders. Evidence shows that increasing the price of high strength alcohol
influences people to switch to cheaper, lower strength drinks. Our experience
is that, when this can be achieved, health improvements follow and the periods
of sobriety when we can work effectively with individuals to help them tackle
their destructive drinking and address the underlying factors driving it will
lengthen. Our visitor wanted to see directly the
impact of high strength ciders on a vulnerable group of individuals and discuss
our concerns. The residents at our hostel have often slept rough for years. The
more seriously dependent will frequently drink ten cans of, for example, K
cider in a day. This represents 40 units of alcohol. The Government’s Chief
Medical Officer advises that we should not regularly drink more than 14 units
of alcohol in a week.
We had a frank and illuminating
conversation with the man from Aston Manor who showed a genuine interest in
exploring how the company’s products, notably Frosty Jack’s, could become less
harmful to those heavily addicted to high strength alcohol. Then, unexpectedly,
we entered into a bizarre exchange concerning what he believed to be the
changing profile of Frosty Jack’s consumers and drinking behaviours. He
explained that the purchasers of Frosty Jack’s were becoming increasingly
diverse with evidence that it was now being taken to dinner parties, no longer
encumbered by connotations of ‘park bench’ drinking. The quick grin that I expected to follow,
indicating that I was on the receiving end of some self-deprecating humour
didn’t come. This, it seemed, was a seriously held view.
Before our meeting I had entered
‘Frosty Jack’s’ as a Twitter search and was unsurprised to see that the bulk of
the comments focused on excessive drinking and regretful inebriation. The butt
of the jokes were people on low incomes with perceived poor taste and young
people below the age when they can legally purchase alcohol, typically drinking
Frosty Jack’s clandestinely in the park. The language used included: ‘low
life’, ‘dossers’ and ‘chavs’. The executive from Aston Manor seemed genuinely
disappointed to hear this. Privately I reflected that delusional beliefs
associated with alcohol are not just the preserve of the addicted. Similarly, Brookfield Drinks, the producers
of Kestrel Super claim on their website with extraordinary, if ludicrous,
sang-froid that this super-strength lager is ‘a beer for sipping, possibly from
a wine glass - and certainly one for sharing’.
The campaign to reduce the damage
caused by super-strength lagers and high strength ciders has had some impact on
government which has formally consulted on the levels of duty that should be
applied to high strength ciders. Supported by the Alcohol Health Alliance http://ahauk.org/ we have made our submission and await the
government’s response, hoping that a rise in duty and subsequent increase in
price will result. We know that if this
can be achieved it will create the impetus to move dependent drinkers to lower
strength, less damaging brands.
The step of moving from a high
strength cider to one with half the ABV may seem inconsequential, but in the
frontline battle to help people live long and fulfilling lives instead of
short, embittered and painful ones, it is crucial. Sometimes we get a breakthrough. Last week,
my colleague Dave told me with pride about how his team had successfully
‘weaned’ hostel resident Jimmy off of K cider onto a 3% brand. Jimmy was well known for frequently being so
disorientated that he needed to ask staff whether it was morning or evening. After only two weeks on the lower strength
cider he was eating better, keeping himself clean, not wetting his bed and, to
Dave’s considerable relief, ‘not kicking off at the drop of a hat’.
There is a more radical solution than
trying to increase the price of high strength ciders and lagers and that is to
stop producing them altogether. Far from it being a pipedream divorced from
financially driven realities, this has happened. One of the most well-know, indeed notorious
white ciders was White Lightning, often referred to by those who had
experienced its special hallucinatory qualities as ‘white frightening’. Over a
decade ago we hosted a visit to one of hostels for senior executives of
Heineken which produced White Lightning. Not long after the visit the company
reduced the strength of White Lightning and then a few months later stopped
producing it altogether. It was a brave
move, made without fanfare, for which I remain supremely grateful.
There is a precedent, therefore, that
other companies can follow and in doing so lives can be saved. How can it
possibly be justifiable to continue producing cheap, high strength ciders and
lagers for a market dominated almost exclusively by those with the most severe
alcohol dependency problems when it is predicted by health experts that almost
63,000 people in England will die over the next five years from liver problems
linked to heavy drinking?
Sometimes I find myself fantasising
about the moment when the Heineken executives took their unexpected decision to
dispense with White Lightning. I imagine a corporate board room and around the
table a group of executives poring over financial projections and market share
ratios, trying to weight up their options. But the executives who visited our
hostel and saw the misery and damage caused by their product find their minds
drifting back to this experience and finally one of them says – ‘Fuck it, let’s
just stop producing this stuff and tell the Board and shareholders that it’s
called our ‘Doing the Right Thing Strategy’.
It wouldn’t have been this way – but I like to think that it was.
Comments
Curmudgeon, on your figures, six and a half cans of Special Brew would cost £11.44, over three times as much as the £3.50 it costs to buy three litres of high strength cider. In my experience tripling the price of something tends to have a fairly significant impact on consumers, that's the point isn't it? Or am I missing something.
But the more important point I think is this. I agree with Curmudgeon that Special Brew is now at a price which is around the price it would be if minimum unit pricing was introduced. Tennent's is costing around the same now. As a result, both have fallen out of favour with people who are seriously alcohol dependent and living in our projects or sleeping rough. They have become too expensive. In contrast, K cider has increased in popularity as it is much cheaper. Four 440 ml cans cost around £4.29 from Iceland. Each can contains 3.5 units and I am sure that if the price was increased to the same kind of figure as Special Brew then K cider too would decline quickly in popularity.
Consumer behaviour amongst dependent drinkers is extremely price sensitive. Creating a price incentive to encourage people to drink, for example, Carling at 4% ABV would bring significant health benefits but this won't happen when high strength ciders and lagers remain so cheap.