Evaluate alcohol minimum unit pricing against cancer incidence
Scotland and Wales put a floor under the price of alcohol. Deaths from liver disease have already fallen. Cancer takes longer to show, so someone has to keep measuring for a decade.
Minimum unit pricing (Scotland 2018, Wales 2020, Ireland 2022) reduced alcohol sales by about 3% and alcohol-specific deaths by about 13% within three years. Alcohol-attributable cancers (oral, oesophageal, liver, colorectal, breast) have latencies of 10-20 years, so the cancer benefit, which is a large part of the policy's justification, will only be visible if a pre-registered evaluation with cancer registry linkage is funded for the long term. Natural-experiment designs comparing Scotland with England, and dose-response by deprivation, are feasible because registries are complete.
- Prevention we already have is not deployed · Around four in ten cancers are preventable with tools we already own: vaccines, tobacco control, weight, alcohol, sun and infection control.
- Weak real-world evidence and registries · We do not reliably know what happens to patients after approval, so we cannot tell which drugs deliver in practice.