We mustn’t accept a rise in alcoholism as inevitable, writes Prof Woody Caan, while Isabella Stone bemoans taxpayers having to fund No 10’s boozy culture. Plus letters from Catherine King, Mike Pender and Owen Wells
Prof Julia Sinclair is one of the most thoughtful doctors I have ever known (Millions in UK drinking harmful levels of alcohol at home, experts warn, 17 January). She reports a change to longer sessions of drinking in many more people during the pandemic. That is a sobering judgment. An alarm really rang for me, in relation to hospital care, when Sinclair said that there have been more patients going into “delirium tremens”, because that is an indication of alcohol dependence.
For vulnerable people who are now drinking too much, introducing changes to the alcohol culture, such as Scotland’s minimum unit price, would pull some back from the cliff of addiction. But for those who have became dependent, clinical care and community support are essential for recovery. In the past 50 years, I have seen too many lives distorted by alcohol-related diseases to accept an extra 2m cases in the next decades as inevitable.
