Commissioner to side with drinkers in EU strategy

Calling time

As Europe dances and drinks the summer nights away, a debate is going on at Brussels’s DG Sanco, the EU’s health ministry: how far should the new alcohol strategy aimed at curbing Europeans’ drinking go?
Due to be published after the rentree in the post-summer cool of September, the strategy follows on from a hard-hitting report on Europe’s “growing alcohol problem”written in June on behalf of the commission by London’s Institute for Alcohol Studies.
Given that the IAS has close links to the temperance movement, its tough recommendations should have come as a surprise to no one, and suggests that some among the professional busybodies in the directorate who ordered the report secure in the knowledge of its perspective favour opening a broad new front in the war against unhealthy lifestyles. Perhaps EU officials are flush with a sense of success in the battle against that other addiction, tobacco. In recent years, EU law has set maximum limits on tar and nicotine yields, imposed new and larger pack warnings, and most recently, effected a tobacco ad ban in press, internet and radio across Europe. Germany, with its large tobacco industry and libertarian instincts, uniquely did hold out against the ad ban for much of this year, but in June caved in and said it would comply, having been threatened by European court of justice action by health commissioner Markos Kyprianou, who has taken up the tobacco hostility baton of his predecessor David Byrne with relish. Smokers’ stronghold Germany is also weakening under EU peer pressure to limit smoking in public places. (A great deal of the money behind smoking bans comes from major pharmaceuticals – namely Glaxo, Novartis and Pharmacia and Upjohn in Europe and Johnson & Johnson in America – all of whom want to earn much money from expensive smoking cessation products; but that is another story.)
The IAS report, by World Health Organisation stalwart Peter Anderson, notes that, while drinking has dropped greatly in southern Europe, it has grown enormously in northern Europe in the last two decades – almost doubling in the UK. Growing personal wealth is one cause. Another important factor is the freedoms of the single market to import large amounts of alcohol from cheap countries for personal use. In Scandinavia they talk of the domino effect, where each state monopoly engages in downward price competition with its neighbours who in turn are competing with low-tax Estonia and Germany.
The total health cost of alcohol to EU countries in 2003 was $125 billion, about the same amount as tobacco. There are dozens of ailments attributable to alcohol, and more are being discovered – the connections between alcohol and the transmissions of HIV for instance.
Showing clear inspiration from Nordic alcohol policy models, the report recommends a ban on alcohol advertising, warning labels on wine bottles, a minimum licensing system for alcoholic products across Europe, a minimum buying age, a standardisation of blood alcohol limits for driving, and four other recommendations.
The question to be asked now, though, is: how many of the Copenhagen-based Anderson’s recommendations will be reflected in the strategy. As silence descended on DG Sanco – there was no press release to accompany the IAS report – insiders report “strong and varied opinions” inside the DG as to how to frame the strategy.
While there are some zealots inside the DG, the boss is not one of them. During his confirmation hearings in 2004, Kyprianou made ambivalent noises about the fight against alcohol, and insiders report that he remains far less keen at pursuing drinking than smoking..
He is reportedly wary of taking on the drinks industry, which has lobbied heavily against targeting “the product instead of targeting the heavy drinkers themselves” and which questionw the scientific credibility of the report.
As the commissioner for one of the smallest and least powerful DGs, Kyprianou could also be wary of the way the report’s recommendations transgress on to the territory of other, bigger DGs, such as DG taxation, DG transport, DG internal markets, all of whom jealously guard their competences.
Several I spoke to agrees there will be something: the one that would get the biggest consensus support in the council and parliament under a Finnish presidency that is strongly pro-restrictions is reportedly a lower maximum blood alcohol concentration limit for young and public vehicle drivers; 0.2 permille, contrasting with 0.5 for other drivers. (0.8 in the UK) “This is one piece of legislation everyone could rally around,” notes Lisette Tiddens-Engwirda, head of the European doctors’ union CPME.
The alcohol strategy comes only shortly after, elsewhere in the institutions, DG agriculture’s attempts to get European producers to tear up their vineyards in return for compensation, because currently too much of the wine goes unsold and has to be turned into biofuel at great expense. In short, some restrictions, but no full-out war, as on tobacco.