Posts by nzlemming
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
your hypothetical pre-pubescent lush is more likely to be influenced by an environment where a pervasive binge drinking culture among adults than where the frig the “drinking age” is
Perhaps. But when I was 18, (some moons before you, O! best beloved), we could usually sneak into a pub or buy from the bottle store. And when I was 16, we could get someone that was 18 to go for us. I first got seriously smashed at 16 and regularly thereafter. I can see the same pattern repeating at a lower age.
My parents were not in any way binge-drinkers – a small sherry before dinner, wine only on special occasions (although apparently dad could stack it away when they first got married, but mum came from good Presbyterian stock so that was the end of that).
I definitely was, for many years. The only thing that stopped me (at around 33) was not being able to handle the hangovers any more. Where did that come from? I have no idea. A bit of peer pressure, I suppose, but I was willing and able and whole-hearted with it.
Back then (and we’re talking the seventies), what limited intake for the very young was that it tasted so bad. Beer was bitter FFS! Wine was sharp, and most spirits would take your head off and would usually only be drunk on a dare. The taste for bitter things generally comes late in physical development. What worries me is the RTDs and alcopops which are designed to be much more palatable for young tastes. So “it’s yukky” is no longer a built-in limiter for them.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Sacha,
You seem to be saying that raising the age restriction will *not* have the opposite effect that lowering it did. Can you explain that please
I am indeed saying (almost) that. As I said earlier, I'm not sure that the genie will go back in the bottle. Reversing a process may not always have the opposite effect.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Was it a marketing thing, do you think? I'm curious why binge-drinking seems to have become a problem world-wide, and I wonder how much of it traces back to marketing the products at the young.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
Anyway, to get this whole strange discussion back to base: am I happy with quite powerful psychoactive drugs being sold from behind big-ass point-of-sale displays in suburban dairies?
No, I am not.
We agree on that.
Do I think these drugs should be available to adults who want them?
Yes, I do.
I honestly don't know and I'm not prepared to say "yes" or "no" because I'm not a user at all (I have enough issues with my damn prescriptions!) and so I have no dog in that fight. But I really am not sure we know enough about what's in them and whether that will lead to long-term impacts in health and welfare. We know (and I use the word very circumspectly, given what I've already written today) that some of these drugs are produced from any ingredients that are legal by people who don't give a shit about the user, only the dollar. Not all, I know, but how to tell which is which? More importantly, how to tell a teenager...
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
Can I get this straight? Do you think that abolishing any age restriction on the purchase of alcohol would result in more or fewer 12 year-olds consuming alcohol
I am not in favour of 12 year olds drinking alcohol. I do think that abolishing age restrictions will result in more 12 year olds drinking. I have seen no evidence that raising the restrictions back to 20 years will reduce 12 year olds drinking. I was against lowering the age in the first place because I could foresee that it would lead to more 12 year olds drinking (there were always outliers). That clear? Good.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Sacha,
Increasing availability by lowering the legal purchase age is widely reported by ED and other health sector specialists as having resulted in more harms to young drinkers, isn't it?
There are still restrictions on availability. You can only buy it at certain places if you're of a certain age, right. That hasn't prevented health and societal problems or reduced consumption per capita of those permitted to purchase it. As a society, we drink more every year. If we were doing it right, we wouldn't have campaigns about "It's how we're drinking".
The fact that it's now legally available to 18 year olds doesn't change the fact that it's still a restricted item. Or that we had problems when the age was 20. Yes, it's more available now, and we appear to have more problems with the age of drinkers getting even younger, to a point where they can't even begin to metabolise the stubstances they're drinking let alone deal with the issues of being drunk.
That doesn't mean that the reverse will fix that, or with the cannabinoids. I fear it's a one way street - genie's out of the bottle and it won't go back in. When have you ever known a generation that has gained something give it up?
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
With all due respect to ER staff, they only see the people that turn up to ED. And by definition they only see the problems. Not saying that underage drinking is or isn’t a problem, I just think that by asking ER staff you would be getting a rather slanted view of the issue overall
In my view, any that they see is too many. And, if only a proportion of those drinking actually go to the ER, then the problem is even greater. I don't think any 12, 13 or 14 year olds have the physical of psychological maturity to be consuming alcohol unsupervised (I'm not talking about a glass of wine at a family meal, here).
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
Do you dispute that removing age restrictions on the purchase of alcohol would create a greater problem? Would you seriously, knowing what we know about the risks of cannabinoids in adolescence, propose making the synthetics available without age restriction? Would you change the law to make it legal to sell cigarettes to children?
What? Please point to ANY statement where I suggested ANY of this?
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
Basically, we've repeatedly seen that a key factor in the "legals" becoming a problem is irresponsible commercialisation and marketing. It happened with BZP, and it's happening now with the cannabinomimetics.
We are in agreement on this.
I think the future of sensible non-prohibition approaches rests quite heavily on addressing that risk.
I take your logic.
It's not just me. In the UK, Transform's blueprint for drug legalisation (executive summary) has a lot to say about regulation of availability (especially to young people), packaging, etc.
And right there in the first line is why I have trouble with such an approach:
Global drug policy is rooted in a laudable and justifiable urge to address
the strong, and very definite, harms that certain non-medical psychoactive drugs can create.Such an urge would have been laudable indeed if more than just a few of the politicians who put the policies in place actually held it. But much drug policy was formulated in the 50's, 60s and 70s, and was more of a reaction to youth rebellion against the establishment - "Drugs make them do these things; let's ban drugs!". There have been a rare few pollies who have worked on the health aspect but, because logic points at loosening drug prohibitions and regulating consumption instead, they have largely been derided as favouring decriminalisation, while the McVicars of the world get the public megaphone to shout "Reefer Madness!" from the rooftops. Some people may have had this urge, but policy and enforcement have never been driven by it.
The second line is closer to the truth, but it is only referring to the means, whereas I think the "threat" aspect is much closer to the real urge. The public has been kept in a state of fear of these substances for decades because it makes an easy bully pulpit at voting time. Much of the "strong, and very definite, harms that certain non-medical psychoactive drugs can create" have actually been due to the prohibition culture and not to the drugs themselves.
They're quite frank about the fact that getting the balance right on availability isn't easy -- too harsh and you encourage an illicit market again -- but quite a lot of thinking has been done about this stuff
Yep, and I'm glad it has and I'm glad they're cautious, but it's not the first report by the first think tank that has suggested a different way of doing things. A charitable foundation, however influential, does not make or change public policy.
Sure, their proposals seem to make sense, if one can cast off the societal preconceptions of "Drugs bad! Can not haz!" that we live under, but they don't have any evidence that the proposals will work. They cite medical drugs, nicotine (which is interesting as there are far more harmful constituents in tobacco) and alcohol as examples to say that what they're proposing isn't revolutionary - are they saying that we don't have any problems with those three?
Look, I'm pleased to see the report. It's good to have a document of substance and I'm heartened by the comments at the back from people around the world hailing it. But it's a long way from saying "restricting access WILL reduce problems" because it just hasn't with the Big Three. There is still prescription drug abuse, which has led to the restriction of anything with codeine and pseudoephidrine in it (a bit of a bugger when you're allergic to aspirin and innurred to paracetemol but still get cluster headaches from chronic illness). There is still alcohol abuse, both healthwise and societally. And people still die from tobacco-related illnesses (very few actually die from nicotine poisoning, by the way,so let's call it what it is and not pretend it's just nicotine at fault).
That's what I mean by saying restricting access to things does not mean you will restrict consumption or problems and to claim that the reduction in tobacco consumption as evidence that access restriction works is very shaky, in my view.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Russell Brown,
You're crossing conversations. The "correlation" point was made to Sacha, who appeared to be making too much of one data point.
The underage drinking comment was made to show that restricting availability is not restricting access [ETA or consumption]. Or do you dispute that underage drinking is a problem?