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Who would buy Sir Liam Donaldson a pint these days? Not many Brits, I expect. The chief medical officer's proposal to tackle the great British scourge of binge drinking — a minimum price of 75 cents per unit of alcohol — was shot down by almost everyone from 10 Downing Street to the bloke propping up the bar at the Slug and Lettuce.
Yet nearly 10,000 km away, in a Southeast Asian country with roughly the same population (60 million), Sir Liam might have some sympathizers. Thailand has one of the world's highest rates of alcohol consumption, and all the burgeoning social ills that accompany it: domestic violence, sexual assault, street fights, teenage binge-drinking and alcohol-related disease.
Like Britain, Thailand has embarked upon a rocky legislative road, hoping that new laws will fix an old problem. While Brits debated minimum pricing, Thais were arguing the merits of prohibiting alcohol sales during Songkran, or Thai New Year, which runs April 13-15 and is the country's most important annual holiday. This is a bit like Sir Liam banning booze at Christmas. Better known among tourists as the Water Festival, Songkran is famous for mass water-pistol fights and — with millions of Thais visiting their families — insanely busy highways. During last year's festival, 360 people died in road accidents and 4,794 were injured. The main cause? Alcohol. Some 80% of road accidents during long holiday periods are due to drunk driving, a senior Thai health official said recently.
Thailand is a largely Buddhist country, and one of the Five Precepts of Buddhism forbids intoxication. Yet excessive drinking is deeply rooted in the culture. "Thais are fun-loving people," said a recent editorial in the newspaper Thai Rath. "We all know that a party is not complete without drinks." This perhaps explains the ban's lukewarm reception from British-educated Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's government. The Tourism Minister claimed it would drive away foreign visitors and further damage a vital industry already reeling from global recession and the shutdown of Bangkok's two airports by antigovernment protesters last year.
In Britain, PM Gordon Brown rejected minimum pricing as unfair to the "responsible, sensible, majority of moderate drinkers." He also knows that, in the midst of a recession and with his poor ratings, making booze more expensive is political suicide. Brown's Thai counterpart Abhisit enjoys greater popularity among his people, but still cannot afford to anger them — not when his country's unemployment rate has (like Britain's) spiked sharply. But Abhisit needn't have worried. With Songkran fast approaching, the ban was scrapped — not because it was unfair to the responsible majority of Thai drinkers but because, like minimum pricing, there was no guarantee it would make any difference. Thais would either stockpile booze or buy it under the counter.
Thailand has an increasingly vocal antialcohol movement. Last November Thai Beverage PLC, the country's largest producer of alcoholic drinks, indefinitely postponed its stock listing after Buddhist monks led a blockade of the Stock Exchange of Thailand building in Bangkok. Thais in favor of prohibition also cheered the passing of an alcohol-control act that took effect in February last year. It raised the legal drinking age from 18 to 20, banned alcohol-related advertising, and — at a time when Britain was liberalizing its licensing laws to allow for round-the-clock drinking — restricted the sale of alcohol to only two periods: 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. to midnight. But Thailand's alcohol-control act has changed little. Take Songkran deaths: in 2007, 361 people died on the roads during the festival; in 2008, with the act in force, 360 died — only one life saved. More people are killed by drunk driving in Thailand in two weeks than in Britain in an entire year.
So is Britain's present — twentysomethings with end-stage liver disease, "binge black spots," city centers carpeted with vomit — also Thailand's future? It doesn't have to be. Thailand's per capita alcohol consumption is still half that of Britain's, according to the most recent figures from the World Health Organization. But Thailand could learn at least two lessons from Britain's battle with the bottle.
First, forget about quick-fix, feel-good bans and start enforcing the laws you already have. In Britain, drunk driving causes 16% (rather than half, as in Thailand) of road deaths, thanks to a combination of strong policing, heavy penalties and shocking public-awareness campaigns. A three-day booze ban over Songkran will change nothing. Better policing will.
Second, think before you legislate. Curbing alcohol abuse among young people, for example, has as much (if not more) to do with parenting as with policing. If Britain has any message for Thailand, it is this: to create a nation of responsible drinkers, there's no magic elixir.
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