What is the point of being a blogger if you aren't controversial! Those very few who know me in real life will know that I have had a journey with alcohol. The self medication of choice for my mood disorder. I'm sorry not 'of choice' because you have very little choice unless you are iron willed from a young age and can tell your peers to piss off. Alcohol from the cradle to the grave! Alcohol reaches the parts that other drugs cannot reach: Legally! A drug that decimates indigenous communities. I'm not going to hold back in this post so if you are one of those 'moderate' drinkers who likes a glass of wine and "why should my civil rights be affected by problem drinkers"...then...fuck off now!
Right, have you gone? Good! The only thing I haven't done on alcohol is attend an AA meeting. On a given Friday or Saturday night in Bingeland Britain, cavemen and cavewomen are out giving it large justifying their behaviour "I work hard all week". Some are giving it so large that they are giving Hospitals and Emergency Services the full weight of their alcohol soaked neurosis. I'm saying this as one who has done it himself. Unfortunately for you dear timorous reader, I am an evangelical 'all or nothing' type, a radicalised former smoker and drinker who believes not only in sticking 50 measly pissing pence on a unit of alcohol. I believe in prohibition. Drinkers and Gamblers need to go to special clubs, seedy underground dens (not glamorous casinos) where they can join the smoking social pariahs outside should they require another hit. As it is, the dens of iniquity are all along our high streets, St Mary Street, Cardiff, a perfect example. You can gamble and piss away your Universal Credit on your way home or of course the nation's dietitians will be tempting you with fast food fare all along sunset strip. And this used to be called Temperance Town.
Why do I make this pitch on a blog that reaches about 90 readers on a good day? Well if we as a nation, as a people are to stand up to the fearful might and butchery of the Islamic State of the Levant, then we, good people, are going to have to sober up. To defeat fundamentalism, we are going to have to become fundamental ourselves. We are going to have to take a zero tolerance policy to behaviour that undermines civic pride be it drinking, gambling or drug taking. However I would not penalise the users. I would go in hard on the pushers. The Capitalists at the top end. I would tax them out of existence. Keep the price of addictive substances low, as ridiculously low as they are now and then hit the Breweries and Alcohol Manufacturers with big corporation tax so their executives have to take a huge drop in salary. These peddlers in misery need to feel the austerity that their victims feel day in day out whilst trying to find enough sheckles to get a hit of the insidious fire water. There is nothing worse than a convert and I have just displayed that in this post but seriously if the alienated lone wolves of the Islamic State are using the tools of Capitalism like HGV lorries to attack innocent babes in arms, then we have to undermine a system that kills thousands and millions of its own people every year before they get their hands on them. Don't forget, the holidays are coming.
I don’t believe that prohibits works but would be perfectly happy to see cheap booze in supermarkets being banned or at least attracting a tax that could be used to help treat alcoholics. My own sister was a chronic alcoholic who died at the age of 46. I think that if,as a family, we had been able to get her sectioned and treated, she might have still been with us today.
ReplyDeleteA tax to treat alcoholics is a great idea. Is alcoholism treated as a mental health condition? It should be. Getting a family member sectioned is almost impossible unless they are deemed a danger to society more than to themselves. The unseen self harm in this country is enormous. We all suffer silently.
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