REGARDING the remarks of Mr R Jeeves on smoking and the cost to the NHS (Letters, June 28).

Instead of keeping on putting up the prices of cigarettes, he would do better to concentrate on the damage that alcohol does to people's health and what that costs the NHS.

It is much more than smoking does. You have only to go to hospital casualty departments at weekends to see the drunken louts who have been fighting and see all the trouble it causes at football matches, in clubs and elsewhere.

Wife-beating is also caused by drink in most cases.

It is time the Government did something about the cost of drunkenness to the country and its population.

M HALES (Mrs), Berkeley Street, Nelson.