Thank you very much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here and a privilege as well.

As you can see, I'm definitely trying to go back in time, but I've only managed 2014.

I was actually here in 2000 to 2003.

The reason why you can teach most of internal market law for the prism of

alcohol beverages is precisely because the alcohol industry has hardly been regulated at EU level.

And in essence, what I'm trying to explain today is that the EU alcohol strategy is no

perfection and certainly no absolute perfection.

And I'll say even that the alcohol strategy is an absence of strategy.

So that's in essence what I'm trying to demonstrate today.

I'll do that in two parts, as you would expect, from a French person.

That's what's left of my culture at French universities. You do two parts with two subparts.

My compatriots will forgive me for not having an introduction that does one fifth of my talk,

and for having a second part that's much longer than the first part.

But the first part will be setting the scene and I'll give you a few figures.

I won't bombard you with figures, but I'll give you a few, to give you a sense of the

scope of the problem and why we should perhaps discuss the EU alcohol strategy in the first place, I will then in this first section show

what the EU has done in the field of alcohol policy.

And I will then, in my second part, focus more specifically on one area of EU intervention, or Lacour, we'll see, which is the

regulation of alcohol marketing in particular, as one part of this strategy. So alcohol is the

third leading risk factor for premature death in the European Union. That's been the case for quite

some time, but that still is the case today. You see that there are some differences in terms of

alcohol consumption from one member state to the other. These differences have narrowed across

...