Ah it's much easier to interview tescos "ah no we can't do anything - can't interfere with the market" (see R4 this morning) than actually wonder why young people or anyone for that matter might want to drink themselves into oblivion. Legislation, that's what we need, more legislation, to demonise the wasters in our otherwise perfect society. Or something like that. Sorry haven't got an answer but I do agree.

What I'd like (and will never get) is someone with some influence to come out and say the bleeding obvious - i.e. that life in a highly geared, media drenched consumerist society tends to make a lot of us bloody miserable a lot of the time. Lets deal with that idea and not all get into a puritan tail-spin about only the most visible of consequences.

Never mind booze and fags (crap drugs both for the most part) what about the prescription drugs, the pain killer addictions and the fact that
white collar London (and not just the media mob) has a major and largely unreported coke problem? You only have to look at how a lot of people drive to see that they are getting an extra "edge" from somewhere. There's not much mind expansion going on, little in the way of inner space travel just a lot of ramping up and damping down of the old angst and anger levels. Reminds me of Waterloo Station in the 70s when they used to play marching music over the "Tannoy" in the morning and soothing light classical in the evening. Back to your hutches folks!

It's beyond social class, gender and age and the young are the least of our worries. Getting off your head with minimal consequences (at least minimal for the vast majority of revellers) is a privilege of youth so to demonise that when it is merely the most visible symptom of a nationwide issue seems bizarre espcially when self-medicating behind closed doors is something of a national pastime.

The issue of alcohol in society can be summed up thusly..

We're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't.

We allow it, and suffer the societal consequences.
We forbid it, and suffer the societal consequences.

I admit I find the defense of legal alcohol tinged with a certain sense of schizoid realitycheck- booze is the biggest addiction in the western world, which is why it's allowed and smoking pot isn't, I suppose. It's all very hypocritical.

Does anyone see a move towards pot decriminalization in the UK and US anytime soon? Will new administrations continue the prosecution of marijuana as the leading threat?

Perhaps we'll get some of that Sharia law and poof, no more ale.

On that day, I officially become an insurgent, I guess.

That's only because of the high moral values and social standards of the typical Greenockian teen though, I suspect.

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?

In America it is harder to buy beer from a supermarket than almost anywhere else for an underage person. The register will not proceed until the teller enters a birthdate from an ID. If they are found putting in fake ones they are fired...this is the policy at most US supermarkets and it's my experience that they uphold it well. Most US supermarkets only sell beer, some of the bigger ones also sell liquor but have to (in the state of KY anyways) have it in a separate room with a separate register and not out in with the general merchandise (to prevent shoplifting, I guess).

ban it all. let's make this island a fucking dry county for one year and see the changes in overall production and the more positive outlook we all would have getting up on monday mornings for instance. and young 'uns for one year without booze to contaminate them might just open their eyes and see the possibilities in life rather than when they can get down the local shop for some white lightning and get into a fight and dads getting home beating their kids up cos they're full of whisky of a saturday night and mums feeling suicidal and left alone all day with a bottle of vodka or a bottle of red and the marriages that just collapse in ruins because of alcohol related screaming and shouting and crying and storming out and all the people that are killed on the roads by pissed up cunts that are too selfish to get a fucking taxi home and the violence in our city centres on saturday night after closing. the wreathes just keep mounting up outside every towns civic centre and all the surrounding bus stops and all the broke fucking people drinking themselves further and further into debt drinking beer in pubs that sometimes have near a sixty percent mark up and all the cool rockstars with their jax and cokes and their heroin habits........................................................perpetuating the ice cool image of a man elegantly wasted and worldly wise.

i stepped out of the loop and this is the first time i've told anyone about what i've seen for myself over the last two and a half years of being a clean headed righteous fucker. and i'm not telling no fucking person here there or anywhere how to live their lives but i can assure you ... i can guarantee you that stopping drinking is by far the greatest, most wise thing you'll ever do bar nothing.

my life now is like a fucking executive jet ride of grown up mature feelings and righteous ambition for all things good to happen to my family and mates. and i know that at any time day or night i'm fucking on it if i need to be, i'm there for whoever needs me.

i'm reliable. for the first time ever in my forty three years i'm reliable and do you know what? boring and straight as that sounds IT FEELS FUCKING GREAT XXXXXXXX

sermon over