No more games for drunk Brits
By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Thursday, February 11, 2010 - 6 Comments
In 2008, 5,000 teenage girls were treated for binge drinking
In a desperate attempt to stop Brits from drinking excessively, U.K. officials are banning drinking games and all-you-can-drink deals at pubs and clubs that cater to the nation’s growing binge-drinking culture.
The crackdown includes outlawing games such as the “dentist’s chair”—where alcohol is continuously poured into a customer’s mouth while they are restrained—along with incorporating compulsory identity checks on customers who look younger than 18 years old. In addition, establishments must provide free tap water and offer customers the choice to select either a single or double spirit, or a small or large glass of wine. Bar owners who break the rules could be fined upward of the equivalent of $34,000, or even spend six months in jail.
According to Britain’s National Health Service, alcoholic liver disease deaths are soaring, along with drinking-induced crimes that cost the U.K. between $13 billion and $22 billion a year. But health experts say the new laws don’t go far enough: it’s “better than nothing,” says Carys Davis, spokesperson for Britain’s Alcohol Concern charity, but the restrictions “seem tame” compared to raising the minimum price of bulk alcohol products (at shops and supermarkets, many alcohol products sell for less than the cost of brand-name mineral water), a move the NHS is lobbying for.
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They're drinking what?
By Alex Shimo - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 45 Comments
Kids seeking a quick high are downing hand sanitizer
The best way to drink hand sanitizer is straight, like whisky, and down it “like a shot,” explains Tyler, a Grade 10 student who lives in Toronto. Undiluted, the alcohol-based liquid tastes a little like “vodka and bug spray,” he adds.The alarming comment from the 15-year-old mirrors a growing number of news reports about teenagers and children drinking the antiseptic hand-cleaning products. Most hand sanitizers have an alcoholic content between 60 and 90 per cent, which means that even small amounts have led to a number of cases of alcohol poisoning in younger children. That percentage is much higher than even that of most hard liquors, giving it an appeal to kids looking for a quick high, explains Jane Wells, a drama teacher at Toronto’s after-school Care Program. Wells has come to know a lot about this subject: she discovered that a group of eight- and nine-year-olds drank hand sanitizer at school just before she took them on a school walk. When she noticed them acting strange and giggling, they first told her they had been drinking alcohol, but after some probing, confessed it was really the hand cleaner. They told her they’d been enticed by the promise of alcohol “right on the bottle,” she says. Continue…
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Malaysian model caned for drinking
By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 15 Comments
Kartika wants to be punished in public, not in a Malaysian jail
Six lashes—that’s Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno’s sentence for quaffing a beer with a few friends in a Malaysian bar. Kartika, a part-time model, will be the first woman caned there, and her case has divided the Southeast Asian country. Drinking isn’t technically illegal in Malaysia, but since Kartika is Muslim she is subject to Islamic sharia law, under which the consumption of alcohol is a punishable offence.Moderates and non-Muslims say the ruling establishes a dangerous precedent by disregarding human rights and undercutting the mainstream Malaysian legal process. According to Hamidah Marican, executive director of Sisters in Islam, which works to strengthen women’s rights in Malaysia, “Kartika’s case has . . . caused damage to Malaysia’s reputation as a model Muslim country.” Continue…
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Should you let your kids drink at home?
By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 2:20 PM - 17 Comments
Some parents think it’s the safest option; experts aren’t so sure
Chris Seger knew her son Sean would party hard the night of his graduation—and she knew she’d start worrying the moment the door clicked shut behind him. So the Calgary mom took matters into her own hands, inviting the entire class of 2007 from Sean’s small high school to her acreage west of the city for the post-convocation bash. There, with the help of a couple of other parents, she assembled an environment for teenage boozing that Elmer the Safety Elephant himself might have endorsed. “When the kids got here, they handed over their keys and we closed the gate behind them,” she recalls. “We had a barbecue. We gave them some fruit. We set out cases of water so they wouldn’t get dehydrated. We told them all that if at any point they didn’t feel comfortable, they were welcome to come into the house.”Seger stopped short of actually supplying alcohol; about half the kids who attended had not yet reached Alberta’s legal drinking age of 18. Still, the 20 or so partygoers seemed to have a good time. Many brought liquor, and as the night wore on, the teens crashed in tents set up in the yard. As Seger made fried-egg sandwiches the next morning, a still-tipsy boy approached her to show off a pocketful of bottle caps—one for every beer he’d quaffed. “I think the kids just wanted to have that experience,” she says. “Our thought was, let’s just make sure they’re safe.”
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Finland’s epidemic of cheap booze
By Susan Mohammad - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 9:50 AM - 4 Comments
Among working-age Finns, drink is now the leading cause of death
It’s last call for cheap booze in Finland. Doctors are pressing the government to raise the taxes on alcohol to combat an epidemic of out-of-control binge drinking that has made alcohol the country’s number-one killer.
Over the past decade, alcohol consumption has doubled in Finland. Its citizens now out-drink all of their Nordic neighbours, consuming an estimated 10 litres of pure alcohol a year. In 2005, drinking overtook heart disease and cancer as the leading cause of death among people ages 15 to 64, and since then the problem has only continued to grow. According to Statistics Finland, alcohol-related deaths increased by a worrying nine per cent in 2007 alone and more than 2,000 Finns now die of alcohol-related causes each year.
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Tempest in a bottle of mouthwash
By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 4:31 PM - 2 Comments
A controversial study sparks debate over the effects of alcohol
It’s a ritual observed by thousands of Canadians every day: brush, floss, gargle and spit. Rinsing with mouthwash doesn’t just provide a scrubbed, minty feeling; it’s good for our health, we’re told, curbing plaque and gingivitis (not to mention bad breath). Some brands even carry the Canadian Dental Association’s official seal. But this so-called healthy habit could be doing more harm than good. Australian researchers recently concluded that mouthwashes containing alcohol may contribute to oral cancer.
Tobacco use is the biggest risk factor for oral cancer, according to the Canadian Cancer Society. Combined with excessive drinking, it’s even more dangerous—a heavy smoker and drinker is up to 30 times more likely to develop it. Even so, “there’s a small group of patients who don’t seem to have any risk factors,” says Michael John McCullough, an associate professor at the Melbourne Dental School and one of the experts behind the report. “I noticed some were saying they’d used alcohol-containing mouthwashes over a long period of time.”
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Megapundit: The Big Three's 'great reckoning' is upon us
By selley - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 1:27 PM - 0 Comments
Must-reads: …David Olive and Don Martin on the auto industry; Dan Gardner on oil
Must-reads: David Olive and Don Martin on the auto industry; Dan Gardner on oil addiction; John Ivison on losing confidence in the Tories; Chantal Hébert on Jean Charest and Dalton McGuinty; Christie Blatchford on the Toronto 18.
The death of the truck
Things aren’t as bad as they look for the internal combustion industry… yet.Auto industry consultant Dennis DesRosiers has last month as “the second best in the history of Canadian auto manufacturing,” Don Martin notes in the Calgary Herald, and even as GM slashes jobs in Oshawa, Ford is adding 500 in Oakville to make the “new Flex crossover vehicle, complete with what sounds like a beer cooler in the console.” This is what happens when gasoline crests $1.30, he argues, and Buzz Hargrove “is clearly off his meds if he truly believes this truck sales skid is preventable or reversible.” Far more sensible than propping up production of gas-guzzlers, as McGuinty seems determined to continue to do, would be to invest in “advanced efficiency or environmental technologies for the auto industry.”
“This is the great reckoning,” David Olive writes in the Toronto Star. This is what Detroit gets for betting the farm on “gas-guzzling but high-margin SUVs and heavy trucks” when $1.30 gasoline was “foreseeable,” while mulishly refusing to invest in their own hybrid vehicles. And this is what Dalton McGuinty gets for not tying “auto-sector subsidies to a Detroit commitment to small, fuel-efficient vehicles.” “The new Motown bosses reject the … tradition of satisfaction with intermittent profits,” Olive concludes, “and will be dispensing still more bitter medicine” in hopes of stable profits and stable employment for its workers. There isn’t a thing Hargrove can do about it but “fulminate.” And away he goes…
