It is the stuff of nightmares, of the darkest imaginings. The phone call in the night or the police visitation to the front door and grave looking officers asking if they can come in. Then the desperate rush to the hospital, knowing that all that is left is mere hours in which to say goodbye.
It's the scenario that you'll never see on an advert for alcohol on the internet or TV.
Ed Farmer died with his mother and father at his bedside in December 2016. He had collapsed after an initiation style drinking binge at the University of Newcastle and he was 20 years old.
At his inquest this week it was suggested that Ed would probably have survived if he had been taken to hospital, but instead he was carried back to a friend's house to sleep off the alcohol. His friends found him unconscious, cold and blue.
At the inquest it was revealed that among those friends there was culture of silence, that older students asked the freshers be 'discrete' about the drinking binge (which had been banned by the university itself).
No doubt these friends will carry with them a terrible burden of guilt and remorse that will shape their lives for many years to come and non of those named in the inquest emerge from the process very well.
Despite the university's zero tolerance approach to drinking binges of this nature it has been powerless to prevent tragedy, not due to any failing on the institution's part, but because of a collective failing that we all bear responsibility for.
We have created an alcoholic and addicted culture that claimed Ed Farmer's life and until we are collectively honest about this, there will be many more tragedies like this.
Globally, alcohol accounts for five percent of all deaths. In 2014 it was calculated that a death like Ed Farmer's happens once every ten seconds somewhere around the world, amounting to three million individuals a year. There are no memorials to this holocaust, only billboards and neon signs and cut price alcohol promotions.
In Britain, and in most other developed countries, we have woven this powerful addictive drug into the fabric of everyday life, it is so lethal because it is so normal. A vast industrialised infrastructure from brewery to warehouse to supermarket and pub exists to produce ethanol for leisure consumption at rock bottom prices.
Alcohol pervades all parts of our culture and alcohol manufacturers have the best of all worlds from government. Alcohol's main narcotic competitors are criminalised and the drinks industry is subject merely to the farce that is the government's 'responsibility deal'.
The 2011 Public Health Responsibility Deal, launched by the then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley, subjected the industry to the lightest of light regulatory touches and established the Responsibility Deal Alcohol Network (RDAN).
It was not endorsed by any leading alcohol harm professional or academic and was rejected by most public health organisations, which suggests that the public health part of the deal's title has little meaning. The Institute of Alcohol Studies was damning:
" In July 2013, protesting the Government’s u-turn on its commitment to introduce minimum unit pricing in England, Prof Nick Sheron, co-chair of the network, withdrew along with most of the remaining public health bodies in the RDAN, including Cancer Research UK, Alcohol Research UK, the Faculty of Public Health and the UK Health Forum. These organisations saw the move as evidence that the RD was being used as a substitute for legislation and so undermining a more comprehensive public health policy. Consequently, the core remaining group of the RDAN is dominated by the alcohol industry, which provides 12 of the 15 representatives. Moreover, of the three nominally independent NGOs involved, two (Addaction and Mentor UK) receive significant funding from the alcohol industry. As a result, regardless of the substance of the RD, it has lacked legitimacy from its very inception. The alienation of independent NGOs and academics (see below) from its formulation and development continues to count against it."
The body which ostensibly was established to protect the public from ever greater levels of alcohol related harm instead has become a vehicle for alcohol lobbying. The burden of responsibility now rests on the drinker and the advertising tagline 'drink responsibly' has now been incorporated into the wider process of selling alcohol, as John Hopkins University researchers pointed out in 2014. A report on the university's research concluded that:
" According to the study, most of the ads analyzed (87 percent) incorporated a responsibility message, but none actually defined responsible drinking or promoted abstinence at particular times or in certain situations. When responsibility messages were accompanied by a product tagline or slogan, the messages were displayed in smaller font than the company’s tagline or slogan 95 percent of the time.
Analysis of the responsibility messages found that 88 percent served to reinforce promotion of the advertised product, and many directly contradicted scenes depicted in the ads. For example, a vodka ad displayed a photograph of an open pour of alcohol with a tagline that implied the drinker had been partying all night. In small lettering, the same ad advised the audience to enjoy the product responsibly."
The study itself stated that:
“While responsibility messages were present in almost nine out of ten ads, none of them provided any information about what it means to drink responsibly, Instead, we found that the vast majority of responsibility messages were used to convey promotional information, such as appealing product qualities or how the product should be consumed.”
What is true of alcohol advertising in America is true of alcohol advertising in the UK and the rest of the world. We have once again given the alcohol industry and the wider culture that sustains it a free pass, there will be no representative of the industry at Ed Farmer's inquest. Instead they will be represented in Westminster, at meetings of RDAN and other opaque gatherings. The responsibility for the carnage that alcohol causes will fall onto Ed Farmer, his grieving family and his remorseful friends. Once again profit is privatised and carnage socialised. To call this an injustice barely begins to describe the situation.