Recent bulletins and hot topics from the 
drug and alcohol bank:
Health benefits lost by reversal in English alcohol price policy
When for England the UK government reverted from a proposed minimum price per unit of alcohol to a ban on pricing below duty plus VAT, they abandoned a policy that would probably have had 40–50 times the impact on consumption and reaped correspondingly greater health gains.
Record alcohol treatment numbers in England still not enough
In England a record 114,920 adults were in specialist alcohol treatment in 2013/14 and nearly 4 in 10 left as planned free of dependence. A good record, but probably still most dependent drinkers who might have benefited from treatment did without it, partly because relatively few found their ways there via GPs and emergency departments – a sign of the shortfalls in England’s screening and brief intervention provision.
Scottish alcohol treatment system has three times the capacity of the English
Evidence that in 2012 Scotland’s treatment caseload equated to 1 in 4 of the country’s alcohol-dependent adults, over three times the 1 in 14 ratio in England, partly a consequence of extra funding accompanying the 2009 national alcohol strategy. Can it really be that proportionate to need, Scotland’s treatment system has three times the capacity of the English?
Also, Findings hot topics for November/December 2014:
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