The statistical analysis in this paper is rather tricky but the basic design is simple - a study of the number of suicides before and after a change in law to restrict alcohol sales and consumption.
The authors use the correct technique (ARIMA) to study change in the daily count of suicide. Time series analysis is very tricky because of a problem called serial autocorrelation: if the numbers are up one day they are likely to be slightly up the next day too. This happens because natural ups and downs which are continuous are sliced by us humans into counts which start afresh every midnight as a daily count. The same is true for daily counts of, say, hospital admissions during an epidemic (and at other times).
So the count for each day is correlated with the day before and the day after. As you know, independence of the observations (i.e. no correlation between them) is really important for routine statistical analyses: hence the need for a special technique to cope - ARIMA.
The message of the study seems clear, however: 1. Alcohol kills and 2. laws work.
Slovenia' start position was 17 litres alcohol per head - the highest in Europe. By 2003, according to the WHO European office database it was down to about 9 litres per head: similar to France and the UK, but the French trend is down and ours is up.
A large report from SCHARR looked at the economics of alcohol consumption. Based on evidence of price elasticity (i.e. what happens when you put the price up) the CMO's call for a minimum price of 50p would preferentially reduce drinking among poor and young people i.e. do exactly what is needed. Gordon Brown dismissed it out of hand. But perhaps CMO will outlast Gordon and try again.
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