Re: Alcohol | Forum — The Modern Antiquarian

shanshee_allures wrote:

handofdave wrote:

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

Why use the term 'abuse' Dave? If you mean those whose drinking has meant their lives have spiralled out of control, sure. But I 'use' alcohol, I don't abuse it. I probably drink way over my accepted levels but then thay chages every blimmin week anyway.

I get pissed sometimes, which to me is using it in the right and proper way! I get happy, a bit dumb assed, but never, never want to hurt anyone.
Now if there was something definitive in alcohol that caused that, I would be hurtung people, so it really is down to individual tolerance, you've got to accept that surely. We cannot ever penalise the majority cause of a rotten minority.

I don't see the point in always 'comparing' alcohol to drug use either (which even I know isn't always 'drug abuse'!)
Alot of folks are scared of drugs through conditioning /lack of exposure etc as much as anything I reckon.

I would however totally clamp down on anyone whose crime involved alcohol consumption, be it driving, fighting whatever. Because of the misery their behaviour causes, and if the are repeat offenders (often the case) I would like to see the introduction of either jail or the option of voluntary 'antabuse' injections, I'm serious there. Something radical has to be done, because there are hoards out there for who alcohol is no good.

I still say it's partly down to cultural ignorance too (see France and kids round the table for wine - sounds bloody sensible to me).

I find it a bit mournful hardly anyone wants to speak up in favour of the old sauce these days. Now off to open one of those lovely bottles:-)

Indeed - in cases of allegedly alcohol-fulled violence, I believe that booze merely brings buried feelings of aggression to the surface, rather than being the direct cause of them. The sad truth is that if drinking were prohibited altogether, people with latent tendancies towards violent, desctructive behaviour would most likely find another, equally destructive, outlet for these tendancies.

I'm in favour of increasing public spending on educating people about the dangers of alcohol abuse, as advocated above by Jane. However, I do have a problem with the "all or nothing" model advocated by organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous, and their apparent belief that there is no workable middle ground between addiction and total abstinence (not to mention their ridiculously outmoded presupposition that their clients have to believe in a power higher than themselves in order to beat their condition - in other words, if you're an atheist, you're beyond help).

To me this is an unhelpful outlook which leads alcoholics to relapse and accept that they'll never be able to conquer their addiction Moreover, I know people who've both worked with alkies and been alkies themselves who've expressed serious doubts about the validity of this approach.

Like you say, the vast majority of people who drink heavily don't directly harm anyone else in the process, and I'll happily speak up in favour of recrteational boozing even though I've been a fairly major binge-drinker myself in the past.