Four Per Cent Inebriation

I was reading the other day that nearly one third of the alcohol sold in the UK is drunk by just 4% of the population - which is a staggering statistic.  It certainly puts into perspective all those recent attempts to scare us all into drinking less alcohol.  Clearly, most of us are drinking less alcohol: the problem drinkers, the ones who should be targeted, are a relatively small group.  Moreover, the kind of alcohol they are drinking is, in the main, that cheap, rough as a dog's arse, cider or strong lager you can buy cheaply in supermarkets and the like.  Apparently, the average strong cider drinker can consume around sixteen litres of the stuff a week.  Which is very scary indeed.  The damage they are risking to their health is immense and potentially fatal.  But the point I'm stumbling toward here is that the problem drinkers in our society aren't drinking real ales or expensive spirits like decent whiskys - they are drinking vast quantities of strong lager or cheap vodka.  Yet always the proposals to curb problem drinking are the same: an indiscriminate surcharge on alcohol, making the 96% of us who drink moderately pay for the problems of a minority. 

Surely, it would be more logical, not to mention fairer, to focus additional alcohol taxation on the types of drinks which are actually at the root of the problem?  (Although, arguably, upping the price of cheap alcohol to try and put it out of the reach of the 4% will either result in them turning to crime to fund their habit, or turning to substitutes, such as narcotics, to feed their addictions).  But alcohol isn't really the root of the problem, is it?  It's clear that the majority of this 4% are living in poverty, a significant proportion of them street drinkers. Arguably, their alcohol abuse is merely a symptom of their problems - what starts as a way to numb the pain of their desolate lives quickly becomes a dependency.  The real base problem is poverty, complicated, in many cases, by untreated mental illness. Now, I'm not saying that we should ignore the damage being dome here by the alcohol abuse, but the excessive alcohol consumption of the 4% can only be properly addressed by tackling their most fundamental problem: poverty.  We really need to be asking ourselves why, in the twenty first century, in a technologically advanced and relatively wealthy nation, 4% of our population live in such misery that they end up drinking a third of the alcohol sold here in a vain attempt to oiliterate the miserable, poverty stricken reality they find themselves trapped in?