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?
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