Why are minimum alcohol prices going up?

There's something gloriously strange about a minimum unit price. Most economic interventions work by taxing sin — the state takes a cut and hopes you think twice. But MUP is different: it's a floor, a declaration that alcohol has a minimum cosmic value, and selling it cheaper would be a kind of fraud against our own biology. The money doesn't even go to the government; it flows to the producers. It's a policy that says, "We don't trust your brain to negotiate this deal alone." And that's the truly wild part. Our brains are terrible at pricing pleasure. Alcohol doesn't just taste good; it floods the nucleus accumbens with dopamine, a molecule that whispers "this is valuable, do it again." Cheap, strong booze is essentially a hack — a way to buy euphoria at a discount. By raising the floor by 30%, Wales is trying to add friction to that hack, to make the shortcut less attractive. It's applied neuroeconomics, dressed up as a grocery bill. The evidence so far is deliciously ambiguous. Some studies suggest heavy drinkers cut back; others show the industry quietly absorbing the cost or consumers switching brands. The 30% rise is a bold move — a kind of perturbation to see how the system responds. It's like poking a strange attractor and watching where the trajectory lands. Ultimately, this is a story about the weird economics of self-control. We're not rational agents; we're walking bundles of impulses, heuristics, and cravings. A price floor is one of the few tools that treats us as we actually are — gloriously irrational creatures who occasionally need the universe to make bad choices more expensive. As the BBC reports, the experiment continues. And in a cosmos full of strange forces, the price of forgetting is one of the strangest of all. Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cm2dwd97repyo