The demon drink - 1000 children under the age of 14 in alcohol treatment programmes last year!

[Donk]

This article says it all really.....
here

No one else interested/concerned then? Or just the board moving so fast on Fri Eve...

The problem with the message is two-fold.

Firstly, there is nothing new in children drinking alcohol. Ever since it was invented, some children have taken alcohol to excess. Victorian society was riddled with it, as was Georgian society.

When children worked in factories, up chimneys, on farms, they considered themselves adults, and took their habits accordingly. The modern age is no different, except that children assume their adulthood from the media, and not from the hard school of knocks, as was previously the case.

Secondly, it isn't helpful to link alcohol and heroin. They're different devils.

I don't see this as a statement of modern society. It was ever thus.

Desiderata, I accept that alcohol has long been a problem. However IME the problems caused by alcohol do seem to be increasing. That there was more hard drinking in Victorian times does not mean that we need to do nothing now, although it helps to keep things in perspective. I did not think that the article was comparing Heroin and alcohol, but again trying to offer a wider perspective by comparing the relative numbers of deaths caused by each.
Do you not think that there is a problem?
What do you think we (as a society) should be doing about it?

I think it's very sad that there will probably be a lot of teenagers who will not get their GCSEs or A levels because they are raging alcoholics by exam time. I have known someone who drank heavily from the age of 8, who by the age of 16 was very very ill, and dead by her early 30s.

I don't think you can compare 100-200 years ago with nowadays. Until people had clean water available, the safest thing to drink was beer or tea. Tea was expensive.

Of course alcohol has been a problem forever. It has not always been plonked in front of us at bargain basement prices at all the hours of day and night. It has not always been socially acceptable for young people to stagger about pissed as farts in town without being aprehended.