Why the alcohol industry can’t afford to let us kick our drinking problem

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James Wilt, PhD candidate and author of ‘Drinking Up the Revolution’, writes that we aren’t talking enough about the influence of the alcohol industry on Britain’s unhealthy drinking habits and how alcohol’s ubiquity is largely due to “its commodification and deregulation by Big Alcohol”.

Wilt states that the industry has successfully maintained self-regulation and offloaded responsibility for harm on ‘problem’ users “especially through the discourse of ‘responsible drinking’”.

He argues that: “The crisis of alcohol-related harms is principally caused by the fact that the profit-motivated alcohol industry structurally incentivises higher-risk drinking”, highlighting that their profits would fall by £13 billion a year if drinkers consumed within the guidelines.

As well as limiting the alcohol lobby’s power – through advertising restrictions and restrictions on density and hours of sale – Wilt argues that there also “needs to be a massive expansion of free and public alcohol-specific healthcare for higher-risk drinkers that doesn’t demand sobriety as a condition of use, including managed alcohol programmes, therapy, medication-assisted treatment and psychiatric care”.

“Ultimately, this is about expanding opportunities for relaxation, socialising and pleasure in ways that don’t eventually kill, injure or harm.”

In our podcast we spoke to James Wilt about his Guardian article, as well as his new book: Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy.

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