It takes more than one measure to change established behaviour.

I HATE to spoil the fun, but do you mind if I introduce a note of rationality into the hysteria surrounding the alcopops tax? Would it be naive to mention that there's a vast body of evidence about how people's behaviour can be modified? If we're serious about discouraging binge drinking, we know roughly what to do.

Forget shock-horror advertising, for a start. If you want to change the way people behave, you need to make significant changes to the environment that shapes their behaviour.

And there's never just one magic solution: you'll have to do several things at once if you want to exert the pressure needed to upset established patterns of behaviour.

When, as a society, we decided to discourage people from smoking, we did as many things as we could to make it harder and less attractive to smoke. We raised prices (via taxes) so high that smoking became a seriously expensive habit. We severely restricted the areas where people can smoke. We banned the overt marketing of cigarettes, issued dire health warnings attached to cigarette packs and increased the weight of anti-smoking propaganda.