Beer is the new Opium

I was listening to an interview with the boss of the brewery conglomerate SABMiller, Graham Mackay. His multinational company is one of the world’s largest producers of alcoholic drinks. He was talking about their expansion into China. Currently they are the second biggest operator in China with 37 breweries. He says that their production there is increasing faster than in anywhere else in the world but that it’s not making much money for him at the moment because the profit margins are so small.
It amazes me that reporters never seem to consider that alcohol is a drug and that in some ways Mackay is rather like a ‘Drugs Baron’. The only way that breweries can increase their profits is by taking business from other breweries or by getting people to drink more alcohol. We’d all be hearing a lot of consternation and condemnation in the media if these expansion plans were aimed at increasing and profiting from the number of heroin or cocaine addicts in the west.
There are almost no social benefits from more people drinking or from the same people drinking more. There are obviously plenty of disadvantages; domestic violence, child abuse, car accidents, addiction, illness, anti-social behaviour, decreased productivity… the list could go on for a while. Western societies spend a lot of time trying to deal with the problems that people like Mackay profit from. I don’t think we should be so uncritical of his plans for expansion.