Alcohol should be banned
Posted on Tuesday 16th December 2008
No I haven’t lost my senses or gone “peculiar”. It really should be made illegal and vigorously suppressed. Better still the consumption of alcohol ought to be as socially unacceptable as smearing faeces all over oneself. Better still again, it should never have been discovered.
At this point you may, entirely reasonably, be asking what has prompted this change of heart. Especially from someone who enjoys a fine wine or whisky. The rewards of drinking responsibly are undeniable with medical evidence that moderate alcohol consumption improves mortality from a host of diseases. Not to mention the loosening of inhibitions that has made it the great social lubricant.
Unfortunately, working in the medical field, and especially Intensive Care, has exposed me to the malevolent aspects of alcohol. We seem to have an endless trail of alcohol related destruction trailing through the unit. This presents as a mix of assaults, intoxications and trauma cases, all of them directly related to alcohol consumption, and therefore entirely avoidable.
For some reason drink-driving doesn’t seem to taboo in South Australia in the same way as it was in the UK when I was growing up. A couple of years ago over 8000 people were arrested in South Australia alone for drink driving. From personal experience it seems almost all of the car crash drivers who wind up on our unit have elevated blood alcohol levels.
The negative impact doesn’t just stop here. In South Australia again, alcohol is directly responsible for the death of 400 people a year on average. It is also responsible for almost 6000 hospital admissions to the Adelaide emergency departments anually. Overall, when taken with statistics from the other states, it all tallies up to a cost of 15 billion dollars to the Australian economy in terms of policing, healthcare, destruction of property and lost productivity.
The summary is plain and simple – alcohol is the most socially destructive drug known to mankind. It is responsible for more violence, crime, social harm, healthcare demands, morbidity and imposition than all of the other substances put together. It isn’t just the negative effects on the user that cause harm but the knock-on effect to others. This is the family members who are scarred by an alcoholic, the innocent bystander who is assaulted by an intoxicated person, the motorist obeying the rules of the road who is traumatised by the drink driver. All of these direct and indirect effects place an unacceptable burden on society.
Now I’m not for one minute saying that other substances are not culpable for social detriment too, but the enormous impact on society is inescapable. I for one would miss the positive aspects of measured alcohol consumption, not to mention the wonderful liquors that it appears in. However in the interests of society, not to mention the burden alcohol places on our bed state, I would be willing to go without.
Believe me, it’s nearly two years since I had a drop and I don’t miss it AT ALL. I suspect after the prohibition debacle in the US in the 1920s it never will be made illegal, though. I for one resent the way that it underpins so much of socialising in so many countries.
And don’t even get me started on Alccpops…
Drink-driving used to be far more taboo in SA than it is now. Random Breath Testing was introduced in the early 80′s and for a while I guess it spooked people into doing the right thing. Now I guess it’s been around long enough for the scare factor to wear off and people have just got complacent about it.
You could argue that it’s analogous to how HIV infection rates went up around the turn of the millennium (I think it was around then) – all those people for whom the 1980s scare campaigns were either a distant memory or before their time.