The Information Component

Two recommendations recur, almost with monotonous regularity, in virtually every report on the prevention of alcohol and tobacco-related problems produced over the past 25 years. These are the need to spend more on health education and the need for greater controls over advertising. Both of these measures involve intervention in the market for information. Together, the measures adopted in these two areas constitute the government’s information policy; that is, how government attempts to communicate health information to the public and how it responds to activities that could prejudice or undermine that communication. Of course, health education involves far more than the communication of information, but providing information is a basic and an integral part of the educational process. The dissemination of health information is not all there is to health education, but it is an essential component. Indeed, it is an essential component of all prevention policy options. As Christine Godfrey notes in Chapter 7, controls over the price of alcohol or tobacco are unlikely to be introduced, or to survive for long, without the support of a well-informed public. The provision of information is not an alternative to the use of other policy instruments like legislation or fiscal controls, but an indispensible accompaniment.