Drink kills 40,000 French a year

Press, 9 July 1980, Page 21

Drink kills 40,000 French a year

By

PAUL WEBSTER,

“Observer,” London

President Valery Giscard d’Estaing is being challenged to wreck his country’s most profitable industry, booze. The challenge comes in a report which will depict France as a nation sinking into a great alcoholic stupor. The three-year study, led by a cancer expert, Professor Jean Bernard,

would be important simply as a catalogue of repercussions in the most drunken country in the West, where 40,000 people are killed by drink each year. But it goes further, and recommends a 10-year anti-alcohol programme with enormous social and economic ■ implications. Dismantling the car industry would probably be easier.

Bernard has no illusions about the impact of his report, which he will soon personally present to the President. “Alcoholism is the public health domain where the most important single national interest is opposed by the greatest number of personal' interests.” he said, echoing the reservations expressed by the former Health Minister, Simone Veil, when she led a campaign against smoking. “In attacking tobacco, I am choosing the easy way cut,” he said. “Alcoholism is more serious but it is useless to lead'a campaign

against it until we have completely reorganised our agriculture.” The result of the intertwined interests of French wine-growers, spirit and beer producers is what President Giscard himself has called “the most important of social plagues.” With an average consumption of 27 litres of

alcohol a year, the French drink 25 per cent more than West Germans and more than double the amount of British and Americans. More than 4,500,000 French people — nearly one in 10 of the population — are permanently dependent on drink. Two million are officially registered as chronic addicts. Nearly 50 per cent of work accidents and more than 40 per cent of road accidents are directly attributable to drinking. The Economy Minister, Robert Papon, estimates that alcoholism costs the nation more than $16,000 million a year, much of it in industry, where the effect of strikes on production is derisory in comparison. In return the Government receives less than $2300 million in alcohol tax. But, with a tenth of the ~ population directly or indirectly dependent on al- , cohol sales for a living, the most powerful industrial lobby in France has already developed a mas-

sive campaign to wreck the Bernard report. Its immediate trump card is next year’s presidential election, making it unlikely that there will be any early controls. Its long-term safeguard is a change in French drinking habits over the last two decades, which put most of the French population on the alcohol lobby’s side.

Although the image of a drunken France is still typified by a tramp with a bottle of red wine, alcoholism has become a universal social menace, with a swing to hard drinks led by pastis and whisky. With huge advertising budgets, one drink after another has moved up the social ladder or been turned from an occasional aperitif to be drunk like beer.

A cognac firm doubled its sales by putting its product into a frosted bottle, while dozens of former old maid digestifs and aperitifs have been remarketed as long drinks for the young and trendy. Although wine sales have fallen in value by 40 per cent, wine still accounts for 70 per cent of French spending on alcohol. Once despised popular wines have become chic through clever advertising, and wine snobbery has made middle-class dependency respectable. Beer sales have jumped 60 per cent since the war, and the alcohol content is higher than it used to be. (Copyright London Observer Service.)