Not Twitter – Australia.

It still doesn’t explain why there is such an obsession to ban tobacco though.

Jim C – If they ever try to outlaw tobacco there are always alternatives.  Home cured leaves heavily laced with home grown “herbal additives”! 

I recall reading newspaper reports of court cases when I was growing up where a defendant could plead he was drunk and got lighter treatment because of it. The logic behind that always escaped me as it still means that someone old enough to drink actually got so drunk their normal commonsense left them- that still leaves the responsibility with the defendant in my book.

I’m just aware that with tabloid hysteria allied to the push we’ve spoken about before from the ‘nanny knows best’ organisations in our society we could end up with a repressive mullah-like system instead of just punishing the offender we end up punishing the people who DON’T cause trouble.

Some years ago my favourite bunch of non-governmental puritans came up with the ‘passive drinking’ phrase to describe family members of someone who drank- not necessarily to excess either.

There is a point at which these public policy debates become quite ludicrous- and substance abuse is one area where you get the disguised Puritans involved very quickly.

I’ll give you an example- in the 90’s a small religious based NGO in Bristol in the UK surveyed one of the worst sink estates in Britain where unemployment, drugs, family breakdown was rampant and came up with the stat that 3 out of 5 kids were from homes where a parent was clinically determined as an alcoholic.

They then simply extrapolated that figure for the number of families in Britain and we ended up with a screaming tabloid headline that ‘3 OUT OF 5 KIDS IN BRITAIN RAISED BY ALCOHOLICS’.

As it happens that NGO had its funding withdrawn as they were so blatantly unscientific and basically had crossed an increasingly blurred line. You will find small, faith-based (ie Puritan) organisations feeding this kind of thing to the media all the time to fulfil their own religious agenda of promoting alarm.

I know an Irish Minister for Health went after one major drinks company in the early 2000’s snorting and puffing about alcopops and young people. When it was pointed out to him that alcopops constituted (by government’s own figures) only 3% of all alcohol products in Ireland he was suitably taken aback. He’d had the religious nutters and the media claiming that alcopops were behind teenage drinking.

It was also pointed out to him that by far the most popular drinks among teenagers with not much money was high strength lager and cider in lite bottles. Cue one embarrassed Minister.

Alcohol is a neutral object and is to blame for nothing. Its the human that picks it up that’s the problem.

Bloody alcopops – hmmpphh, booze isn’t blue!!