Binge drink measures are 'failing'

Educating the public is not leading to a change in people's behaviour or reducing the harm caused by alcohol, they said.

Tough measures like increasing the price of alcohol, banning alcohol advertising and reducing its availability should be considered.

Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians and Dr Nick Sheron, a liver specialist at Southampton University Hospital, argued in favour of using proven methods to tackle drink problems.

Between 1991 and 2005, the number of deaths directly caused by alcohol almost doubled, they wrote in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). More people die from alcohol than from breast cancer, cervical cancer and MRSA combined.

The pair argued that the turning point in a similar debate about smoking was over the issue of harm from passive smoking, and yet the damage to third parties from exposure to alcohol misuse is far greater, they said.

"Drinking alcohol is a factor in more than half of violent crimes and a third of domestic violence. Between 780,000 and 1.3 million children are affected by their parents' use of alcohol - 30% to 60% of child protection cases and 23% of calls to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children about child abuse or child neglect involved drunken adults."

The authors said alcohol strategies have been reviewed by the Academy of Medical Sciences, the European Commission, and the World Health Organisation (WHO), to see what works.

Effective measures include increasing prices, controlling alcohol advertising, increasing the minimum age for buying alcohol, and restricting opportunities to buy drink.

Specific measures to reduce drink driving, including lowering maximum blood alcohol concentrations, also works, they said. The legal limit in the UK is 80 milligrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood.