Re: Alcohol | Forum — The Modern Antiquarian

Alcohol

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Jane Feb 22, 2008 12:56:39

Replying to shanshee_allures

I have quite strong views about alcohol. Anyone who has been to A&E on a Saturday night knows that. I’m not a methodist or a teetotaller, but I choose not to drink because it once made me seriously ill and I never want to go through that again. I also had a seven year relationship with man whose life was wrecked by alcohol. It almost ruined mine, too, just by association. His shouting and violent, unpredictable behaviour turned me into a paranoid, over-sensitive nervous wreck. It was my fault that he drank excessively apparently! (It wasn't) But I got out in time.

A friend who is a police officer she says that 85% of the crime she makes arrests for is alcohol fuelled: pissed teens on a Friday night, domestic violence, drink driving, petty street crime/vandalism/fighting etc.

It’s too cheap (yes I really believe that) and the biggest problem is society accepts it as a bit of laugh, harmless fun. Young people learn that it’s OK to get hammered. It’s a laugh! More than 70% of the teenage girls I work with who get pregnant do so because they were pissed. Hangovers, unwanted sex and unplanned pregnancies are accepted as a natural hazard of alcohol abuse. I could go on but it’s too depressing.

Soft drinks in bars are hideously expensive. Make them cheaper. Much cheaper. Push up the price of alcohol massively. Serve tea and coffee willingly, rather than begrudgingly as if when you ask you’re a freak. Whenever we go out to a bar, I take my own flask of tea FFS because otherwise, 95% of the time, they’d be nothing for me to drink. (I don’t drink fizzy pop and there are only so many overpriced orange juices a woman can take).

The answer is, as always, education, education, education.

Make it much harder to buy alcohol – availability and price. Teach young children about what it does. More choice of alternative drinks in bars. Sustained anti-alcohol advertising. Zero-tolerance of drinking anything and driving. More dramas and soaps featuring alcohol related stories which don’t glamourise or normalise drinking. Youth work (especially in deprived communities) which give young people information and real alternatives to getting smashed.

Getting pissed is not funny.

A 25 year long campaign featuring all this might begin to help. Costly, yes, but what price if we don't?

anthonyqkiernan Feb 22, 2008 13:08:36

Replying to Jane

Jane wrote:

I have quite strong views about alcohol. Anyone who has been to A&E on a Saturday night knows that.

Why do I have this mental image of you skulking outside the pubs of Oxfordshire, cudgel in hand?

shanshee_allures Feb 22, 2008 15:45:41

Replying to Jane

Jane wrote:

Information and real alternatives to getting smashed.

Getting pissed is not funny.

But getting smashed is fun for some, me included. I got three bottles of wine here for later tonight, can't wait. It feels nice. I have loads of other alternatives too (ie when I go for a walk, read etc). Tonight however I'm settling for what millions do every day with no problems at all.

I mean I don't smoke but do I have the right to ever 'advise' others not to. No! I wouldn't.
I think they'd find it a bit irritating, even though the whole smoking thing puzzles me.

I don't dispute the problems it causes, but you can never, never tar everyone wiht the same blimmin brush just coz some folks get out of their depth on the stuff.

Maybe alcohol isn't for you, good, you had the sense to figure it out - many don't. That is the problem here.

I have been a drinker since about 15, and because the stuff was all around me growing up there was no mystique, so I never felt any need to impress anyone. Young folk are being ostricised more and more IMO, used to be I'd go to a pub (at 15), hide in the corner, utterly behave myself and not act like a lunatic as happens alot now.

The idea of staunchly promoting alternatives is dangeroulsy close to censorship, and we all know the harm that can do.

Jeez, aren't all those rumours about parts of 'the continent' having little of these problems and how theire attutde to children experiencing wine etc testament to where we might be giong wrong?

EDIT: Pick uo on this if I may:
**More than 70% of the teenage girls I work with who get pregnant do so because they were pissed. Hangovers, unwanted sex and unplanned pregnancies are accepted as a natural hazard of alcohol abuse. I could go on but it’s too depressing**

Isn't that solely to do with lack of contraception? I've done pissed and contraception tonnes of times!
Hopefully the message to these girls isn't 'don't get drunk, coz you might get pregnant' but 'if you are going to ger drunk make sure either he covers up or you have some method going down yourself'. Isn't it as counter productive as simply saying 'pregnancy is the inevitable consequnece of sex, so don't do it'?

handofdave Feb 22, 2008 17:05:56

Replying to Jane

That it's the fuel that fires the vast majority of problems that require police intervention or results in losses of all sorts, lives, property, respect, etc... is completely irrefutable.

I recall an evening spent arguing about the blatant hypocrisies in society's asymmetric approach to drugs and alcohol with the older members of my family. They are all 'respectable' members of the establishment society. And their argument consisted entirely of the arbitrary belief that alcohol is not prohibited because it is the commonly accepted substance that the western world tolerates, nothing more. End of discussion.

I think the 'War on Drugs' is merely a way for the far larger, alcohol-using majority to deny their own substance abuse by finding a 'worse' one to use as a scapegoat. The irony is that they are fully cognizant of the heavy price society pays for both legalization AND prohibition, but policy isn't usually based on science, it's based on prejudices in favor or alcohol, and against 'counterculture drugs'.

The best example of how education can cut down on use (rather than the heavy-handed incarceration method) is in the big decline in tobacco use. Regulating it, stopping kids from getting started, banning it from public places, all have had a big effect.

There's a conspicuous lack of public awareness advertising about the dangers of drinking, compared to anti-tobacco ads. Drunk driving ads, yes, even 'drink responsibly' added to alcoholic beverage ads. But I can't recall ever seeing an ad that says 'drinking is potentially hazardous to your health' outside of the don't-drink-and-drive ads.