It is about time that we tackled the problems of alcohol seriously. The recent New Year break, with its many tragedies on the roads, should be enough to convince us all that we should drink more responsibility.

Why am I writing this? In the last year the number of alcohol-related deaths in Britain climbed above the combined numbers of deaths from breast and cervical cancers and from hospital-acquired MRSA infections. It is double the alcohol death rate of the 1990s.

So what is going wrong? Frankly, it's too easy to buy cheap alcohol, and very few people can limit their drinking to a reasonable, non-damaging level.

The facts are that increases in the price of alcoholic drinks have been far less than the rise in people's incomes - alcohol is now much more affordable than it was ten years ago, and massively cheaper than a generation ago. Inevitably, that has led to most people drinking far more than in the past.

Add to that the fact that wine is stronger than it used to be (the average alcohol content in wines has risen from around nine per cent to 12 per cent), and that many more people are drinking wine every day without considering a day off, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Too much alcohol wrecks the brain and the liver in equal measure, and no-one is immune from its effects. It also kills thousands of people on the roads and in accidents in the home (around a third of all house fires are alcohol-related). Many of these deaths are in people who haven't been drinking - they are the innocent victims of other people's drink habits.

Around a million British children are badly affected by their parents' drinking. Drunken adults are the underlying cause of around half of all child protection cases and a quarter of all calls for help to the NSPCC.

Can we do anything to reverse these trends? Simply educating the public doesn't seem to have worked. Either we haven't been getting our message across, or people simply don't listen, or they have that common it won't happen to me' philosophy. Sadly, doctors like myself know only too well how wrong they can be.

In the light of these disturbing facts, Britain's Academy of Medical Sciences, the European Commission and the World Health Organisation have all made their policies on alcohol an urgent priority. They came to the same conclusions.

If people can't heed the health messages about alcohol, then it must be made more difficult for them to drink too much. That means steeply increasing the price of alcoholic drinks, controlling alcohol advertising, increasing the minimum age for buying and drinking alcohol, and restricting alcohol-selling outlets and hours.

On drink-driving, acceptable blood alcohol limits must be below 0.5 grams per litre, and there should be random breath testing.

Will these measures work? After the French brought in stricter drink-driving laws, wine sales in restaurants fell by 15 per cent. In Australia, stricter enforcement of drinking laws for drivers produced definite health benefits inside two years.

Although producers and retailers deny that increasing the price of alcohol-containing drinks will reduce alcohol-related harm, their view flies in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. In particular, raising the costs of alcohol does cause younger adults to spend less on it.

If you have any doubts, look at what happened in Russia after Mikhail Gorbachev laid down strict laws on alcohol control. It is estimated that they saved more than a million lives in reduced accidents, violence and poisonings.

If we continue to keep taxes on alcohol low here, to protect our alcohol-producing industries (spirits, wines and beers bring in billions), then we will inevitably push up the costs on the health service and on other social services, of the consequences of chronic brain and liver failure, and of the social disasters that alcohol brings in its wake.

In 2003, the last year for which we have completed records, we had to admit 150,000 people to British hospitals purely because of their use of alcohol. There were 22,000 deaths directly due to alcohol in the same year. The current estimates are far higher.

Can we continue to let that happen without a fight? If you do drink more than you should - and everyone in Britain must now know the accepted limits - please resolve to control your habit better in 2008 and beyond.