For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       The Scottish Parliament plans to increase the price of alcohol – blaming it for a bill of £2.25 billion a year in violence, disease and lost working days. The Portman Group says that people who drink to get drunk will not be influenced by these measures. And suddenly I'm thinking of Judith Dufour. In 1734, at the height of England's "Gin Craze", Miss Dufour reclaimed her two year old son from the workhouse, where he had been given new clothes. She then strangled him, and left his body in a ditch so she could sell the clothes to buy gin. She was hardly alone in the habit. In the 1730's, gin consumption in London averaged two pints a week for every single resident in the capital, aided by the many sales outlets. By the 1750's, a quarter of all properties in the Parish of St Giles were gin shops – doubling as centres for receiving stolen goods and prostitution. But what was the government to do? It is well understood that much of Scotland's present booze culture is linked to poverty; most prevalent in areas which record some of the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe. And it was not dissimilar in the 18th century. When in 1743 the government acted on the crisis, increasing taxes on gin, it was the poor who rioted, and got the taxes lowered again. It was, after all, one of the few pleasures of the poor at that time. As Francis Place observed, "They had only two, sexual intercourse and drinking. And drunkenness was by far the most desired as it was cheaper and more enduring." A picture is worth a thousand words, however, and it was Hogarth's Gin Lane which famously stirred things up. Featuring infanticide, starvation, madness, decay and suicide it had a significant impact on public opinion, leading to the Gin Act of 1751. These days, it's the financial cost of alcohol addiction that is the shock headline news. In the 18th century, however, outrage latched on to "the neglectful mother". She holds bleak centre stage in Hogarth's picture, with a baby falling to its death from her careless arms. Finally, the middle-classes, who alone could afford a print of the picture, were stirred into reforming action. The Gin Act worked by eliminating easy supply. It prohibited distillers from selling to unlicensed merchants and increased merchants' fees. This sounded the death knell for the small outlets, leaving distribution to larger distillers and retail. Like Hogarth, Dickens believed it was poverty rather than the gin itself which was the problem: "Gin drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt is greater." True. Yet greater still in any list of causes is simple unhappiness. No one sinks into alcoholic oblivion because they are happy with themselves or the world. But who can legislate for the spirit? The poor have no monopoly on despair. After the Gin Act, the government decided on one further ploy: to offer the masses an invigorating yet healthy alternative, the import of tea was encouraged. More writings © Simon Parke