Looks like good old Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States and one of America's Founding Fathers, had uncannily predicted long ago why the recent "Minimum Unit Pricing" of alcoholic beverages in Scotland and Wales would end up failing so miserably even on its own terms:
"No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent [i.e. distilled] spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey."
And there you have it. Substitute "beer" or "cider" for "wine" and it still makes just as much if not more sense, especially in the UK. That is NOT to say that the price mechanism (via taxation or otherwise) is useless, far from it. All else being equal, we know that higher alcohol prices = fewer alcohol-related problems and deaths, at least to a point. But the Jeffersonian wisdom above DOES add a VERY important nuance, namely that the RELATIVE price of less-concentrated alcoholic beverages (beer, wine, cider) compared with the more-concentrated distilled spirits (hard liquor) is more important than the absolute prices of either.
Consider this: the UK as a whole already had, and still has, fairly high but (until recently) very uneven taxes on alcohol to begin with. Wine and especially cider have long enjoyed lower taxes (and thus lower prices per standard drink) compared with beer and hard liquor there. Thus, the heaviest problem drinkers, especially poorer ones, often went for cheap and strong cider to get the most "bang for the buck". Enter minimum unit pricing, a price floor across the board per standard drink which had a much larger effect on raising the price of cider compared with hard liquor. The unintended consequence? At least some of the heaviest drinkers likely at least partially switched to liquor as a result, and ended up getting drunker than they otherwise would, with predictable negative effects.
That said, in the USA where alcohol taxes are much lower, especially for distilled spirits, such a price floor may very well be a net benefit overall. And even in the UK, changing it to a two-tier price floor where distilled spirits would have a higher minimum price per standard drink than non-distilled beverages may very well too. But as it stands currently in Scotland and Wales? It's generally pretty weak sauce at best as far as public health is considered.
Oh, and don't ever expect MADD to admit this either. They have in the past at least half-heartedly called for higher beer taxes, of course, but remained strangely quiet about liquor taxes. It's almost like someone is greasing their palms, or something. Nah, that's crazy conspiracy talk, right?
