Following on from the Seminar on alcohol-use disorders published Online First last week, the lead Editorial in this week's Lancet says that education and persuasion are not effective interventions on their own — and they must be accompanied by government strategies which focus on price, availability, and affordability of alcohol.
The Editorial refers to recent UK guidance from the Department of Health which advise alcohol should not be consumed before age 15 years — and also to forthcoming guidelines from The National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia, which will recommend that alcohol not be consumed before age 18 years. The Editorial says: "Certainly, it is desirable to delay the onset age of drinking. US experience showed that raising the minimum legal drinking age to 21 years (with minimum enforcement) substantially reduced deaths from alcohol related causes. However, education and persuasion are the least effective intervention and so advice by itself in England and Australia will likely make little difference unless it is complemented by policies that focus on price, availability, and affordability at the population level. The UK is often cited as a country that (because of industry influence and the possible political unpopularity of having a drinking age limit) has had an absence of effective alcohol policies, preferring soft measures like education campaigns on issues such as underage drinking, rather than tackling the root of the problem. It is no surprise then that the UK has some of the worst indicators of alcohol related harm in young people in Europe."
Of course, alcohol misuse is not a problem unique to high-income countries. The Editorial refers to the growing alcohol-related problems faced by developing countries such as India, Brazil, China and Russia. It concludes: "Addressing the harms of alcohol as part of a global health agenda is gathering momentum. WHO is in the midst of developing a strategy to reduce harmful use of alcohol in consultation and collaboration with member states. That work will be presented to the World Health Assembly in 2010. A Framework Convention on Alcohol Control (a legally binding international treaty) is under discussion. And a forthcoming Lancet Series on alcohol will explore the dimensions of an effective response required to tackle this global-health threat. But countries should not wait. They need to act now to develop comprehensive and effective policies to make a difference."
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Click here for full Editorial: http://press.thelancet.com/alcoholeditorial.pdf
Journal
The Lancet