Confine dreaded drink to pubs.

Byline: Joan Burnie

IT'S official, Scotland is drinking itself to death, more rapidly and in greater numbers than anywhere else.

The damage this fatal love affair with the demon does is only too apparent.

It fuels crime, clogs up A&E wards, costs the NHS a bomb and destroys families as well as livers but still we're in collective denial.

We must be. Because the minute anyone actually tries to do something about it such as raising the price of alcohol or limiting the licensing hours, we scream blue murder.

Apparently we have some God given right to get blootered on the cheap, 24/7. But I was forgetting, "we" all drink sensibly. It's only other people who don't so why, they bleat, should we be punished? I should have thought the terrifying statistics might give them a clue - in some parts of Glasgow, the alcohol-related death count is five times the UK average.

Deprivation may well play a part but we've got to stop trotting out all these excuses or saying we need to educate people better.

All the education they need is rolling down their street with a bottle in one hand and most likely a chib in the other.

But as that doesn't teach anyone anything. We need something tougher.

Me, I'd not only raise the price I'd shift drink out of the supermarkets and shops and into the pubs where it belongs and where a decent licensee can refuse to serve those who've over-indulged.