To rant about alcohol and the way it's normalised?

[CheapSausagesAndSpam]

It's EVERYWHERE and it's poisonous. People normalise it..."Oh...wine o'clock already tra la la!"

And all that shite.

It's responsible for thousands of deaths and injuries and trauma every year and yet it's the first thing people think of when they want to celebrate something.

Get this

3 May 2017: New figures released today show that hospital admissions due to alcohol are at their highest ever levels.

The data, summarised in a release from NHS Digital, shows that alcohol-related hospital admissions in England have increased by 64% over the last decade, with an extra 430,000 people being admitted due to alcohol-related causes in 2015/16 compared with 2005/06.

This takes the total number of alcohol-related hospital admissions to over 1.1 million in 2015/16.

And this

Alcohol is linked to over 60 illnesses and diseases, including heart disease, liver disease and cancer. Figures from the local alcohol profiles for England show that admissions due to liver disease have gone up 57% over the last decade, and that the number of people diagnosed with alcohol-related cancer has increased 8%.

How is this a lovely drink? How is this something that is ok to do in front of children and even to allow children to partake of?

People on MN often say "Oh I let my 12 year old have half a glass of wine...it's a good way to introduce it!"

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO!?

And new research points to the fact that it causes irreversable damage to stem cells, scrambling DNA and eventually causing cancers.

www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/03/alcohol-can-cause-irreversible-genetic-damage-to-stem-cells-says-study?CMP=fb_gu

Think about it. Society is not doing itself any favours.

Binge drinking until you make yourself ill is normal for a lot of people on birthdays, nights out, weddings etc. Most people don't consume alcohol normally or safely whether that's half a bottle of wine every evening (but poured into 2 glasses so that's ok) or intermittent binge drinking.
I agree that overeating, sugar consumption, lack of exercise are also considered normal but listing other dangerous and unhealthy habits that have been normalised doesn't mean that moderate/excessive drinking isn't one of them.

Also, there is a bit of an obsession with “the Uk attitude” to alcohol. Now if we were Russia I’d maybe agree with you but it’s shown time and time again (you can easily wiki it) that the UK are not top consumers of alcohol, or alcohol related injury/ death. We come way after those European countries you’re all pointing to as examples of sensible drinking.

Binge drinking until you make yourself ill is normal for a lot of people on birthdays, nights out, weddings etc

I can’t think of a single person I know who thinks puking on a night out is normal. Fucking grim.

Why have hospital admissions gone up? I’d look at those wider issues again. “Shit life syndrome”.

I like alcohol but restrict it to weekends and holidays only, because I find it's a very slippery slope and you can end up drinking every night. There are a lot of people who drink far too heavily and regularly; I've known several people who died of alcoholism and some of their close family members still abuse alcohol despite having watched it kill someone close to them. I wouldn't support a total ban but think we as a society should have a better understanding of how many drinks constitutes "heavy drinking" and a lot of people should be cutting back.

💉🚬

Clanestino, ok if the message of this thread is we should not glamourise drinking to excess, then no one will disagree. I don't know anyone who does glamourise it though, even if we occasionally do it.

However I'm not sure the op was just saying let's not glamourise excessive booze consumption, but drinking to your limits is fine.

Anybody else feel like a stiff drink... ?

All things in moderation, including crowing on respective soap-boxes.

'As a recovering alcoholic, no other drug would have rows and rows dedicated to it at a supermarket. Can you imagine picking up cocaine in the same way. '

IMO, it (cocaine), and all drugs should be legalised and taxed accordingly. Cocaine production causes untold devastation, hundreds of thousands lives, utterly enormous environmental destruction and wide-scale slavery due to its illegality. Ditto other drugs. Since mankind has used drugs pretty much since they walked on two legs and developed a more complex brain, I don't see them going anywhere and think legalising all of them is the way to go.

'As a recovering alcoholic, no other drug would have rows and rows dedicated to it at a supermarket. Can you imagine picking up cocaine in the same way. '

But cocaine is just cocaine. Wine, beer, cider making- they’re are crafts. There are vineyards making beautiful products. There are mass produced wines which replicate to an extent this for those who can’t afford the best stuff. There are flavours and densities and tastes. It’s not a drug in the sense you’re describing. The chemical alcohol is a drug. Thats not how we consume it.

And there's another great argument - other countries are worse. So the alcohol related disease, violence etc in this country is fine because other countries are worse? The fact people are so keen to defend alcohol consumption shows how dependent a lot of people are.
And not just winos hanging around the local park but nice middle class families who regularly follow their dinners by sharing a box of wine then a few g and t's not looking at anyone in my family specifically at all

There was a programme - quite a few years ago now - which was about an NHS hospital on one day, looking at all the patients that were in there, or coming in as out-patients, because of alcohol. From "fell over when pissed" people in A&E to people dying of liver failure, to one young woman having facial reconstruction surgery because she had been beaten up so badly when drunk (and by a drunk) that she was badly disfigured. (That last one sounds victim blaming but without remembering the details she had ended up in a situation she would have avoided when sober and had she not been so drunk she would have been able to run away when it all kicked off, it was awful and you felt desperately sorry for her.) The whole thing was appalling - to think of the money spent by the NHS treating alcohol-related issues.

I remember a really long thread on here re cocaine consumption. In the end I was almost completely convinced it should be legalised. The devastation it causes, from what I read on that thread ,because it’s illegal and therefore not regulated is fucking horrifying.

I would never use cocaine because of its links to organised crime. It’s brutal.

'I don't plan to die demented, in fact I hope I will pass away before that point.'

No one does .

Hmm. Uk is 25th on the list, Italy (the other country I have lived in for an extended period) is 87th.

Granted France, which may be the other big reference point for us in the UK, is 17th. I have lived there for shorter periods and would say that there is more publicity around the dangers of drinking there than here.

Funny how some people on here assume OP is advocating prohibition and get all defensive about a nanny state. What's that all about?

I was wondering the same. There have been umpteen straw dog style references to "banning" and "prohibition" not being wanted/needed. Very odd indeed.

"Dirty skank"?

Isn't that a bit OTT and, erm, rude special?

Unless you live in a bubble you will see that problem drinking is glamourised. The common and funny irritating phrase wine o'clock is about people counting down until it is acceptable to drink in the evening. People bleating on sm about their hangovers with pride etc.

expat, I have firm plans for that. When it comes to my personal future, nothing scares me more than the idea of burdening my family with having to take care of a healthy vegetable.
Doesn't change anything on the fact that I will not start drinking or overeating, just to die early. These choices impact your family long-term, unless you are completely alone in this world. Then feel free to do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt others doing so.

Please point me to someone who has advocated prohibition?

Good for you, Clandestino.

I miss my days of being a dirty skank. But I equated that with all the shagging I did rather than booze. That was fun.

I despise alcohol, and find it genuinely upsetting when people accuse me of piety (or whatever) for doing so. Alcohol absolutely ruined my childhood and my family in a way that very few other legal addictions could have, and what really fucking rubs salt in the wound is that no other legal drug seems to be celebrated in such a way (bar caffeine, perhaps. And I wish my parents had been addicted to caffeine instead. I don't doubt that they both had addictive personalities - I do, too - but the fact is that some addictions are less harmful than others. I doubt my kids will grow up depressed because I drink 3 cups of coffee every day.)

It's easy to say 'calm down' when you're surrounded by people who are able to self-moderate. But as someone else in this thread said, many people can't self-moderate so easily, and the lack of ability to do so can run in families. It's nothing to be condescending or sneery at.

If I'm absolutely honest, if I could somehow, magically wipe it out of existence entirely, then I would. I don't think the pros outweigh the cons.