Its not about how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts! - Zig Ziglar
MOST people would agree that some drugs are worse than others: heroin is probably considered to be more dangerous than marijuana, for instance. Because governments formulate criminal and social policies based upon classifications of harm, a new study published by the Lancet on November 1st 2010 makes interesting reading. Researchers led by Professor David Nutt, a former chief drugs adviser to the British government, asked drug-harm experts to rank 20 drugs (legal and illegal) on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society, such as damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs and crime. Alcohol is the most harmful drug in Britain, scoring 72 out of a possible 100, far more damaging than heroin (55) or crack cocaine (54). It is the most harmful to others by a wide margin, and is ranked fourth behind heroin, crack, and methamphetamine (crystal meth) for harm to the individual. The authors point out that the model's weightings, though based on judgment, were analysed and found to be stable as large changes would be needed to change the overall rankings.
So yesterday I was posted a blog post with stats on drinking in the UK. It is apparent to me on many levels that drinking is a problem in this country. One of the main problems that people highlight is ‘Binge Drinking’ and the state of our high streets and towns on an evening and weekend nights etc, pubs and clubs. The consequences of which are not only hangovers to the individual drinking but also to the cost of policing and to the NHS. I heard an interesting scope on this recently the person i heard speaking (i can’t remember who, sorry) said “It is often moaned about now days that there aren’t enough bobbies on the beat, that it takes ages to answer some calls during day time hours. What if we didn’t need to use as many police on the binge drinking culture at night and in the early hours and could reallocate those officers to normal day time SOBER in the majority of cases crime.”. Its certainly an interesting point.
Alcohol costs the NHS around £3.5 billion a year. This is quite a costly stat, one which you would think the government would address, incorrect. The UK government gained £14.6 billion in tax revenues on alcohol in 2014, put simply the government makes money out of binge drinking and drink problems, over £10 billion in profit! Maybe this is why the government won’t pass law on minimum unit pricing of alcohol or review just how glamourised alcohol is on the tv in adverts and soap dramas etc. Could this also be why education on alcohol misuse is not addressed propley, because maybe the government wouldn't mind if the kids of today also turned into binge drinkers and made them some more money?
It was the American Government that created the ‘Disease of Alcoholism’ to shift blame from ‘The Bottle’ to ‘The Man’.
I will be doing a further post looking more into how alcohol is glamourised in tv adverts, shows and in general in todays society.
Also in future posts I will be discussing an idea I have had about opening an alcohol-free restaurant/bar which can offer a lot of benefits to people in recovery, I'm currently waiting on the www.kickstarter.com profile for the project to be verified, once it is i shall write a post about the project with links etc.
For now take care.
-You can’t calm the storm......so stop trying!! What you can do is calm yourself, the storm will pass
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