Amid the column inches devoted last week to the shocking, yet depressingly familiar, news that life expectancy in the Calton district of Glasgow is lower than it is in the black hole of Calcutta, there was a short but telling interview with the Calton resident John Hamilton.

While the World Health Organisation (WHO), the originator of the report, was accusing governments of “killing people on a grand scale” Mr Hamilton, who at 56 has already beaten the odds by two years, was showing said governments how to do it. He is drinking himself to death with the sort of determination more usually associated with Olympic athletes. His daily alcohol consumption is six litres of strong cider followed by a bottle of vodka. This, however, is a mere pre-prandial to a session in the pub.

Even if he drinks only mineral water at the hostelry of his choice, Mr Hamilton is still consuming around 90 units of alcohol a day, 30 times the safe limit for men. “Low life expectancy does not worry me,” Mr Hamilton blithely told The Times. “I like living here. I enjoy the people and the company. It has not killed me yet.”

This is the nub of the problem. Amid the hand-wringing, weeping and wailing about the souls in Calton who have a life expectancy which would shock Little Dorrit, is the uncomfortable truth that in a society which values individual choice above all else, there will always be some who chose the socially unacceptable option.

It may be, as WHO alleges, “poverty” which is causing Mr Hamilton and his ilk to behave with lemming-like disregard for their long-term survival. But it may also be, as Mr Hamilton suggests, quite fun to get completely blootered every day, free from the constraints and responsibilities which burden the rest of us.

It certainly wasn’t poverty, deprivation or bad upbringing which caused Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Brian Jones to behave in much the same way as the residents of Calton and with much the same outcome.

The impression that is always given about Calton is that it is poor diet, bad housing, smoking and drinking which are driving the residents to an early grave. There are, however, many enclaves in the country where the housing is just as poor and the smoking rate just as high, which do not share Calton’s alarming statistics.

Smoking, drinking and eating chips will certainly lower your life expectancy but not by three decades. Even Mr Hamilton — consuming industrial quantities of alcohol on a daily basis — has lived longer than the average Calton male.

The real causes of early deaths in Calton are drug addiction and gang violence. Whatever WHO alleges, “unjust health gaps” do not kill people; sticking knives into other people and heroin into yourself do.

This is not to dismiss the terrible problem or belittle it. It is a tragedy of epic proportions that in an affluent country in the 21st century young lives are being lost on this scale. But it is disingenuous in the extreme to suggest, as many commentators do, that residents in Calton have been herded into some sort of gulag against their will where they have no control over their lives. As Mon Smith points out, there are plenty of happy, healthy residents in Calton.

It is also highly misleading to compare, as the WHO does, the life expectancy of people living in a developed country with free access to modern healthcare, as the people of Calton have, with those living in countries where clean water and basic maternity care are luxuries.

Until we face up to the real reason why people in Calton are dying decades before they collect their pension, there will be no change in the shameful statistics. Until we replace arguing about it with tackling it, the death toll will continue to rise. We currently have a welfare system which sustains destructive lifestyles without initiating change.

In Calton, between 50% and 60% of the working-age population are economically inactive. It is easier to park people on long-term benefits than it is to find the energy and creativity to help them move from dependence to independence. It is simpler to pump them full of the debilitating drug methadone than it is to provide rigorous rehabilitation programmes which aim to keep them drug-free.

In Sweden, compulsory drug treatment orders for drug addicts have been introduced as part of a package of measures designed to tackle drug addiction. The country now has the lowest addiction rate in Europe.

Treating people as individuals and getting them to take some responsibility for their destructive behaviour is hard work, expensive and politically unpopular. But until we stop treating the residents of Calton as statistics, the statistics won’t change.

gillian.bowditch@sunday-times.co.uk

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