The British Medical Association wants a complete ban on alcohol marketing in the UK. They are concerned British children get drunk or claim to get drunk far more often than their counterparts anywhere else in the developed world and that the marketers of alcohol are contributing to dangerous amounts of teenage binge drinking. So Britian has a booze problem and advertising is to blame.

I don’t want to minimize the issue of alcohol abuse but it seems to me that most of us are sophisticated enough to understand that advertising is not a silver bullet. Kids don’t get wasted after school because of beer commercials and no ban is going to change that. In fact studies in both Canada and the United States find no significant link between restrictions on advertising and alcohol consumption. Additional research from around the world found that advertising has virtually no influence on consumption and has no impact whatsoever on either experimentation with alcohol or its abuse.

The BMA criticizes the alcohol industry for spending £800m a year promoting alcohol in the UK and suggests that rather than focusing on the behavior of teens to go after “those responsible for marketing alcohol”. The BMA is particularly concerned that, “The alcohol industry uses its prodigious marketing skills and massive budgets to promote positive images about alcohol, and back these up with incentives, branding, enticing new products and sophisticated public relations.”

Perhaps it is easier to go after advertising fatcats than it is to admit a national addiction to booze that is arguably more serious, if better hidden, among older adults than among the younger drinkers most marketers covet. Initiatives to fight for the youth of the nation are considerably better received than those aimed at promoting sensible drinking in adults.