I Read the Booze Today, Oh Boy...

 Drink up, folks, the party is over.
 The writing is on the wall, the jacks are back in their boxes and the queens have gone to bed. The jig is up, the fat lady is singing, and the band is playing their last number.
 The government - bastards that they are - are going to introduce a minimum price for alcohol, based on the number of units contained in a recepticle.
 That minimum price, they tell us, is now likely to be forty-five pence.
 Or, as the drinking world knows it: "Hahaha, you-fucking-what?!"
 Let's backtrack.
 Alcohol is measured in units, these days, based on an arbitrary scale that means nothing at all.
 For example, in the UK, one unit is defined as ten millilitres of alcohol, whereas in Australia, it is defined as ten milligrams. In practical terms, this means that in one hour, a human body metabolises 95% of a UK unit, but only 75% of an Australian unit.
 This is one of many, many reason why Australians can usually be found in bars.
 Still, once we understand how much a unit represents in a given country, we can extrapolate how much it is safe to drink, right?
 Can we fuck, straw man.
 The guideline amounts for people in the UK were "plucked out of the air" by doctors who admitted they had no hard evidence, but felt obliged to say something to justify their pay.
 So, we don't know how much a unit is, objectively, and we don't know how many of these non-objective units are really going to harm us.
 Based on this, the government decided to impose a hard limit of 50p per unit of alcohol per drink.
 The average bottle of spirit contains 700ml of liquid. Purely in the interests of research, I decided to see how much booze I could buy for fifteen pounds.
 Three days later, with a tattoo I don't recall asking for and a nasty rash, I decided that maybe the best way to work this problem out was with solid maths instead of field research.
 Assuming a volume of 700ml, that means each bottle of booze contains 28 shots.
 Once again, if we assume that a spirit is 40% alcohol by volume, which is standard, we arrive at about one unit per shot, meaning that there are 28 units of alcohol in a full bottle of spirits, and at fifty pence per unit, that bottle will cost fourteen pounds.
 Assuming that ASDA is the cheapest UK supermarket (and the ad campaign keeps assuring us that it is) then, as of their website tonight (29/11/12), a bottle of Jack Daniels costs fourteen pounds.
 Or, to put it another way, it costs exactly as much as the government is trying to make it cost, already.
 How much is Gordon's gin? An admittedly under-priced twelve pounds. Only slightly under-priced, however, as Gordon's is only 37.5% ABV, and thus the new guidelines would mean it should cost twelve pounds and sixty pence.
 A staggering 60p increase.
 Smirnoff Vodka? ABV of 37.5% again, meaning it's 40p over-priced at £13.00.
 I could go on.
 In fact I will, because, in light of complaints from the National Association for Drinking Like Old People Fuck (or similar) , the government is now watering-down the law* so that shops only have to charge 45p per unit of alcohol, meaning that nothing will change at all, ever, except that the government will be able to say that they made a law to change things, without actually having to change anything.
 I'm picking generic, brand name booze because anything fancier would automatically cost more, but there are, admittedly, products out there that sell for less than the proposed 45/50p per unit limit.
 These are the sort of products you see on the bottom shelves, with blank labels that just say "Gin" and "Whisky" and "Vodka."
 These products are almost exclusively bought by alcoholics and the homeless, and even then, are not that much cheaper than the government proposal would force them to be.
 Richmond Gin, for example, is the cheapest gin product on the ASDA website and costs £9.65. With the proposed increase, this means the price would jump less than two pounds.
 What difference would it make?
 According to today's BBC report, these price-per-unit increases would save 700 lives annually.
 Again, let's work out the numbers.
 With 70 million people in the UK, this means that we'd be saving 0.001% of the population from death, and, objectively, it's the drunkest 0.001%.
 Forgive me for being hard-hearted, but the drunkest 700 people in England (Scotland is working a different scheme) are probably not the ones who are ever going to contribute much to society.
 As a frequent, heavy drinker myself, I'd like to point out that I'd have to give it some serious fucking welly before I became part of the drunkest 0.001% of the population.
 Even if we were determined to save these people, they're hardly a first priority.
 A quick search of NHS shows that, in terms of annual mortalities, 700 people clocks in below many other fatal things, like, for example, murder. (Murder takes out 970 people per year, apparently.)
 So, provably, the government is more worried about the price of a drink than it is about the murder rate.
 Maybe - hell, demonstrably - the government should really be spending its efforts on more important things, like policing, before it worries about increasing the price of a drink by a pittance.
 Either that, or they should at least raise the cost of stabs per murder, concurrently.

*Geddit?!