How about a chenin blanc boasting "the full aromas of grapefruit and white peach"? Or a pinot noir that offers "ripe cherry, plum and raspberry plus a touch of sweet spice"? Sift through the same wine list and you can chuck grapefruit, gooseberries and pears on top. Start the evening, perhaps, with a couple of gins at £1.95 a unit; finish off with Courvoisier VS for £3.50 a snifter. And what have you got? Some people's idea of a perfect night out at BMA House, home of the British Medical Association.
Does any of this fit snugly with the BMA's new call for a ban on all drink advertising? It would be cheap and rather cheerless to get your "brambly fruits and hints of liquorice" in too much of a twist. But it does raise a logical hiccup or two. Physicians, heal thyselves – and make your own fruit salads?
A couple of years ago estimates had one in 15 doctors experiencing acute booze or drug problems at some point in their lives. Cirrhosis of the liver among medics stood at three times the rate of ordinary people outside the hospital gate. The chairman of the BMA ethics committee talked plangently about a profession in "denial". But he also talked treatment, monitoring and intervention – not turning off TV commercial breaks in the surgery (or making sure that regulars in the Rovers Return didn't ask for a pint of Boddingtons).
Now, of course, there's self-interest involved when supermarkets, wine shops, television companies and newspapers get twitchy over £800m in ad spend a year prospectively disappearingat the stroke of a doctor's pen. How can we bang on about jobs at stake when lives (inextricably entangled with that old favourite, the cost to the NHS) seem to carry so much more weight? Nevertheless, there is principle, as well as too many moving fingers, here.
Whichever way you turn, the cost to the health service goes up. Add 1.5% to its budget every year to cope with the fact that people are living longer: the price of success is a bigger bill. But this is also the price of cutting back on smoking – and the prospective price of dampening drink demand. Draw a line in red ink under the argument. Concentrate on where the ratchet stops.
Acknowledge, first, that tobacco is a special case. Every fag you puff increases harm potential. But alcohol, in controlled amounts, inflicts no such blight. On the contrary, assorted studies show some modest benefits. So the target of an ad ban is quantity alone– not the moderation already hymned. And if we're talking immoderation, then we have to talk about other unpleasant things: such as obesity. Cue some nasty government Foresight inquiry figures.
By 2050 around 60% of men and 50% of women could be clinically obese. Cost to the nation in support for those too big and too ill to work: £45bn. Extra NHS cost for diabetes, strokes and heart disease alone: £6.5bn. This is a long-term problem that puts even binge boozing in the shade. But we don't – yet – lump it in the same supermarket policy trolley. Though some American states are moving that way, we don't put additional taxes on the prime culprits of corpulence: sweet fizzy drinks, sweets, crisps, cakes. Nor do we warn, on the packet, that eating more than three biscuits a day may damage your waistline.
Why not? Why not devise a trans fat indicator and ban promotion of any product that breaks permitted limits? Why not keep fat people off TV, because they're bad role models? Or, indeed, ordain that only honed, toned doctors may practice and so set the required example to patients? All of which is getting too close to a modern Modest Proposal, I know (somewhere near the wacky point where HMG child-helper registrations hit Jonathan Swift). But there is a stage in a free society where education and persuasion have to take the strain.
Because cutting off the oxygen of publicity for drinks or foods that people can – but not necessarily will – abuse is a restraint that tilts responsibility too far. Because other societies across the Channel manage alcohol (and TV plugs for that matter) far more rationally. And, frankly, after so many fruitless years of being relentlessly instructed how to behave, because we all have to start to grow up, shape up – and blow a ripe raspberry aroma at excess.
