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Post by peterba on Jan 18, 2023 21:09:39 GMT
Reading the replies in this thread, I'm guessing that I'll be in a minority, but I have no objection to being warned about potential problems. If I then wish to proceed with the risky behaviour, then that's my choice.
The old saying "Forewarned is forearmed" is valid, in my book. |
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Post by nickr on Jan 18, 2023 22:58:32 GMT
One thing history shows is that more restrictive policies on alcohol generally lead to more alcohol abuse, rather than less, typically by driving it underground.
Now alcohol is actually almost synonymous with civilisation - the beer theory of civilisation suggests that beer was actually the catalyst for settlement, agriculture and thus civilisation itself. So it's likely to be somewhat difficult to disentangle it..
a As to alcoholism, well I certainly enjoy drink too much to ever want to be a prisoner to it. But my great-uncle was by family tradition an alcoholic. He was also a junior infantry officer in WW I, so I think I understand that...
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Post by willien on Jan 18, 2023 23:12:49 GMT
You can have more restrictive policies on alcohol without "driving it under ground".
Andy's riff on the Scottish Gvt.s possible actions always have to be interpreted taking into account of his hatred of the SNP (or if he does not hate them he does a damn good impression of doing so).
Canada is making a recommendation which, while no doubt engendereing complete and utter contempt for any and all official Canadian alcohol advice, does not actually appear to propose restricting access for those reckless daredevils who want to risk 3 drinks a week.
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Post by petrochemist on Jan 19, 2023 8:18:19 GMT
There is a HUGE tank of bioethanol at work (>99.9% ethanol). The flavor wouldn't be nice but if they take away current pleasures I might want to forget about life! Add a little water, and orange juice... It would need more than a little, even just to get through a sample bottle, let alone 100 m3 of pure ethanol. But that was certainly the approach I was thinking off. For the time being I have my juice unadulterated, and my alcohol as ale/cider/wine/spirits... |
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Post by daves on Jan 19, 2023 8:26:48 GMT
Well, America tried prohibition, that worked well didn't it.
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Post by nickr on Jan 19, 2023 10:17:22 GMT
You can have more restrictive policies on alcohol without "driving it under ground". Andy's riff on the Scottish Gvt.s possible actions always have to be interpreted taking into account of his hatred of the SNP (or if he does not hate them he does a damn good impression of doing so). Canada is making a recommendation which, while no doubt engendereing complete and utter contempt for any and all official Canadian alcohol advice, does not actually appear to propose restricting access for those reckless daredevils who want to risk 3 drinks a week. Obviously the nature of forums means my post was incredibly truncated and simplified, and couldn't possibly go into all the aspects of the issue. I mean I tried to cover the entire history of civilisation in a few short lines.  I understand what Scotland are trying to do, and why. Scotland has a much more significant problem with alcohol abuse than England, even. As a general rule (again, much simplified!), the less hours of daylight a country has in winter, the bigger the problem they have with alcohol abuse. But my belief is that controls on price and availability don't really work wherever they've been tried - Russia and Norway, for example. Heavens, Scotland itself for a long while, when whisky was illegal. They foster rebellious, anti-establishment attitudes and increase smuggling and home production, or certainly illegal production. And that reduces safeguards on the quality and safety of the product. And what I was trying to get at is that alcohol is rather different to tobacco - our relationship with it is much older, and much more entwined with our civilisation. It's much harder to change our relationship with it. I also believe that trying to restrict it is probably counter-productive - if we could foster more southern European attitudes towards alcohol, there would likely be less bingeing and negative effects in that way. But that's societal change, and much harder to tackle than restrictive legislation... Now Canada is attempting to tackle it through societal change, that's the point of what they're doing, but I suspect that they've picked the wrong way of doing it, the wrong destination. Problem is that so much evidence suggests that moderate drinking if anything has health benefits, rather than drawbacks, so people as a whole aren't likely to believe or accept a zero target. We will see. Again, much simplified. |
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Post by willien on Jan 19, 2023 14:06:06 GMT
Back in the 1970s, when the French atitude to alcohol was propmoted as much healthier than the UK's, my medic flatmate came back from a lecture with the statistic that one in every five French hospial beds was occupied by an alcoholic. He emphasised that no conclusions were given for this situation.
When one of my pals was, a long time ago, skippering a boat off Norway full of RN divers on a training exercise, they found the only way they could afford to drink beer in the town bar was to buy a bottle of whisky from the boat's store and hand it over to the bar in exchange for beer.
I think it was Sweden that certainly used to not only make it illegal to buy "too much" alcohol but if you bought "too much" sugar in your local supermarket you could expect a visit from the busies - home brewing being illegal.
My own view is it is better to concentrate on punishing bad behaviour of consumers rather than use or possession and bad (including predatory) behaviour of suppliers.
Supermarkets pricing cooking lager below the price of bottled water as a loss leader to tempt customers into their stores I regard as predatory behaviour. Minimum alcohol pricing, brought in to counter that sort of behaviour, does not appear to have had any effect on reducing self destructive consumption so far. My view is it may have some effect in the long term.
Making alcohol less visible and less spur of the moment to buy is also, in my view, unlikely to have much short term effect but might reduce harm in the longer term. I also regard supermarkets (for example) placement of products such as alcohol, tobacco and sweeties (when not legally prevented) as predatory.
There are already UK wide restrictions re alcohol placement and advertising. Looking at whether further such restrictions might help reduce self harm does not in my view seem unreasonable.
I am minded of a Scottish judge once saying - "If a man wishes to demean himself by taking heroin, it is not a matter which in my view should concern the Law.". I rather agree with him but that does not mean that I believe pushing should be tolerated, or mugging old ladies to feed an addiction.
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