Alcohol taxes should be increased to fund rehabilitation services, a think tank has urged ministers.
The Centre for Social Justice said a "treatment tax" on alcohol sold in shops could add 2p to a can of lager and 9p on a bottle of wine.
The money raised would fund residential rehabilitation services, it said.
The Department of Health said it had no plans to put more duty on alcohol but planned to allow councils a budget of £5.4bn for public health work.
End Quote Department of HealthWe are not considering a tax on particular drinks"
The CSJ, which seeks to tackle poverty and its causes, said the costs of addiction were rising, with alcohol-related admissions to hospital "doubling in a decade".
Its report says 300,000 people in England are addicted to opiates and/or crack, 1.6 million are dependent on alcohol and one in seven children under the age of one lives with a substance-abusing parent.
Abstinence-basedA levy of 1p per unit of alcohol should be added on drinks purchased outside pubs by the end of the next Parliament, it said.
It estimated this would raise £1.1bn over five years, which it suggested spending solely on setting up a network of more than 350 abstinence-based rehabilitation centres and providing funding to treat 40 people in each of them.
The CSJ's director, Christian Guy, told BBC Breakfast: "At the moment we do very little for alcoholics, and for drug addicts we just dump them on methadone.
"The chance to get clean in this country is the preserve of the wealthy. For the poor, for the people relying on a public system, there's very little choice to get clean."
A Department of Health spokesman said: "We are not considering a tax on particular drinks.
"Instead, we are reducing alcohol harm by giving local authorities a £5.4bn budget to help them manage public health issues including alcohol and drug services."
He added: "We have also banned sales of the cheapest cut-price alcohol."
Local authorities had the best understanding of local needs to be able to assess, plan and deliver alcohol and drug services and treatment in their areas, he added.
Duty to helpSally Marlow, an alcohol addiction specialist, said there were "problems with the proposal".
But she added: "If we're going to sell it, if we're going to legitimise it and say we sanction alcohol then we have a duty also to say to the people who get into trouble with it, 'we'll help you with it - we'll help you get out of the trouble that you're in'."
The CSJ made a similar proposal in 2007 when the current Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith was in charge of the think tank.
The BBC understands Mr Duncan Smith continues to support the idea.
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