Lying bastards on the letters page

About booze:

Each year, alcohol causes the admission of over a million people to hospital,

No, it does not. The measurement is actually the number of admissions, not the number of people admitted. Let us assume that we\’ve got an alcoholic, one who tumbles over regularly when pissed. How many admissions will he have in a year?

Quite.

Oh, and it\’s not admissions caused by alcohol either. It is the number of admissions which we asssume are related to alcohol, 0.3 of a hypertensive disorder admission and so on.

No  one, no one at all, is actually counting the number of admissions caused by alcohol.

So, from the second sentence, we know you\’re lying bastards.

In 2010, alcohol was 44 per cent more affordable than it was in 1980,

So are jeans, phone calls and bread. What you\’ve shown there is that the country has got richer. Hurrah!

There is a push towards a minimum price for each unit of alcohol in the devolved nations of the United Kingdom, with the SNP leading the debate in Scotland. This is a simple and effective mechanism for the Scottish Government to control alcohol prices.

That\’s a particularly stupid method as all it does is boost the profit margins of the alcohol makers. Oh, as well as being illegal under EU law.

With alcohol harm costing us an estimated £25 billion each year, MPs must act now.

And what a delightfully made up number. However, as has been pointed out many times before, there are costs and benefits to all things. People drink because they like it, the pleasure of the booze is worth the pain purchasing it brings on in the wallet. Thus the value to the populace of booze must be higher than what the populace spends on booze. Over£50 billion then.

We get twice as much out of booze as booze gets out of us, even by your absurd and inflated figure.

So you can bugger offn\’all, you puritan prodnoses.