Then, they came for the booze:

The cost of booze is going up. Whatever you’re used to paying for your favourite tipple, prepare to pay more. The days of cheap alcohol are numbered and, apparently, it is for our own good.

In wealthy nations all over the world, momentum is building for big hikes in the cost of alcohol. The rationale is to stop us all drinking to the point where we make other people’s lives hell by vandalising property, urinating and vomiting in the street, attacking people including members of our own family, and causing death and injury by driving under the influence. In other words, the goal is to stamp out what England’s Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson last week dubbed “passive drinking” - the damage done to innocent bystanders and society in general when people drink too much.

The passive drinking concept is borrowed from “passive smoking”. It is accepted almost everywhere that damage from passive smoking is real, and measures to curb it - taxing cigarettes heavily and banning smoking in public places, for example - have wide public support. Can a similar concept be applied to alcohol? And can the problem of passive drinking become as widely accepted as passive smoking, as hoped for by the World Health Organization, which last year began drafting a global plan to tackle alcohol abuse?

Tackling passive drinking will be an interesting experiment in social engineering. According to Donaldson, the way to do it is to raise the price of alcohol and limit its availability, however much resentment this may cause among the drinking classes. Donaldson proposed that the minimum price of a unit of alcohol (about as much as in half a pint of beer or a small glass of wine) should be raised to 50 pence.

Other countries are grasping the nettle too. The Scottish government is considering imposing a minimum price of 40 pence per unit of alcohol and banning cheap drink promotions such as two-for-one offers and “women drink free all night”. Last year, Australia slapped a hefty tax on alcopops in a bid to reduce heavy drinking among teenagers. And in North America there is much discussion about banning happy hours and similar promotions.

Look out, coffee—you’re next.