I have two very enduring stories I know about booze. The first is a little personal and extremely painful about an uncle I loved; a very brilliant man who attended Makerere University in the 1970s, then got washed down and wasted by booze. In the good old days when Makerere was still an exclusive domain, reserved for the crme de la crme, my uncle made his classmates look ordinary and sloppy at examination time.

But his love for the bottle overruled his higher judgment and he succumbed to it, excelling dubiously as a village drunkard. My cousins found him dead one morning, 10 years ago, along a village path. As usual, he had drunk excessively, but somehow got caught by heavy rain and heaven knows what else happened. He never made it home. And I never made it to his funeral, arriving two days late. I wept bitterly at his grave; bitter that a man so brilliant and extravagantly gifted should die a village drunkard, perish like some commonplace mangy cur. Bitter that a man who could have been anything, died nothing.

The second story also 10 years ago is about a taxi that left Mbale, headed for Kampala. As it was speeding along Tirinyi Road, one passenger suddenly lost interest in the safari and asked the driver to stop. He paid his full fare to Kampala and disembarked at Kamonkoli just six kilometres into the journey. He didn't bother to explain his impromptu loss of interest in the journey. On hindsight, I suggest may be he should have done just that, because nobody left that taxi alive.

After 30 or so kilometres into the safari, the vehicle overturned, killing all on board. The odd-behaving passenger had noticed that the driver reeked of booze from every pore, having downed quite a bit of the stuff from some joint, before commencing to drive.

These are things I had kept to myself until last Wednesday when I was invited to chair a public debate on the State of Alcohol in Uganda report, organised by my good friend Rogers Kasirye of the Uganda Youth Development Link (UYDEL), at the nice conference hall of Statistics House.

The findings of UYDEL portray Uganda as a booze-happy country that competes well at global level. As a country we have failed to make it to the football World Cup at all. We have not been to the Africa Cup of Nations finals since 1978. We have failed at many things; but we have scored success of the wrong kind in even more areas, too many to mention here.

Suffice it to say that we are among the best in alcohol consumption, poverty and also in road carnage. The UYDEL report draws a close link between high alcohol consumption and under development, poverty, HIV infection, marriage break-ups, defilement, school dropouts, road accidents, and many other ills that can be avoided.

At the debate, I listened with interest to a young man called Francis who was orphaned early in life because his father could not say no to the bottle, dying at just 35 years and leaving his family in very capricious circumstances.

One crucial outcome of this public debate was the formation of an Anti-Alcohol Coalition, a pressure group that would like to press for measures against the alcohol industry, on the premise that its purported benefits come at a much higher social and economic cost.

I believe it is time for this society to begin taking serious measures against what I would call Big Beer, the mainstream alcohol industry.

It is time to raise taxes on booze, ban beer advertising and regulate (by reducing) drinking hours, limit places where booze can be sold. It is time also to review existing legislation on booze and make it responsive to the need of this community and enforce it too.