SOCIETY IGNORES UGLY SIDE OF ALCOHOL

After about 200 drunken college students ran amok last week on Fleming
Drive, a local councillor called for a satellite police station.

After a bunch of boozy high school students disrupted a football
tournament and prompted the cancellation of some upcoming Friday night
games, a local coach called for more security.

But nobody seemed to say anything about the real problem: How we tend
to shrug and smirk and turn a blind eye to the ugly effects of alcohol.

Well, somebody wants to talk about it.

"We pick up the pieces night after night, fight after fight, car
accident after car accident," says UWO researcher Robert Solomon. "We
continue to make excuses and discount the fact that alcohol is an
intoxicating substance that causes significant damage in our society."

In addition to teaching at UWO's faculty of law, Solomon is national
director of legal policy for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). And
he says the way we view booze is similar to the way we used to view
tobacco.

"I see us adopting the same head-in-the-sand attitude towards alcohol
that existed so long in the tobacco field," he says. "We've demonized
the illicit drugs -- like heroin, cocaine and cannabis -- but we
enforce the message everyday, in every way, that alcohol is benign and
that myth takes a devastating toll."

Solomon admits we've made progress when it comes to drunk driving --
although he says Canada still has one of the worst records in the
democratic world when it comes to levels of impaired driving.

But he argues we blithely ignore some risky realities.

"The mythology we've created around alcohol is that it's okay to get
blitzed out of your mind as long as you're not driving," he says.

"That ignores the fact that 40 per cent of all fatally injured
pedestrians have been drinking and most are legally
intoxicated.

For young people, that figure is 60 per cent."

Solomon has lots of sobering statistics about alcohol-related
deaths.

He says at least 25 per cent of suicides are alcohol-related (and
higher for young people), 40 to 50 per cent of all drowning and
boating deaths are alcohol-related, 60 per cent of all-terrain vehicle
deaths are alcohol-related, 70 per cent of snowmobile deaths are
alcohol-related; and alcohol-related falls put more people in hospital
for more days than alcohol-related automobile collisions.

And there are the alcohol-related date-rapes, sexual assaults and
general violence -- most never reported.

Solomon points out that if a young person dies, that death was
probably caused by trauma. And that trauma was likely related to booze.

Binge drinking among young people, he says, is increasing.

"Parents will say, 'Thank God my kid doesn't smoke marijuana,'" says
Solomon. "And then they watch him take a case of beer to a bush party.
I don't get it."

It's clear a lot of us don't get it. We live in a culture that
regularly reinforces a benign view of alcohol and does everything it
can to normalize alcohol consumption.

I'm not sure that'll change anytime soon. But Solomon says there's a
simple step we can take to help keep young people safe from drunken
trauma.

"I want the laws against over-serving enforced," he says. "The simple
reality is that alcohol is sold to people past the point of
intoxication because it's profitable. And the only way to change that
is by making it less profitable."

He says that means sending more police to bars, laying more charges,
levying more fines and suspending more licences.

And don't tell Solomon the sale of booze helps contribute to jobs and
taxes.

"For every dollar we gain in tax revenue on alcohol, we spend
approximately three dollars in social costs of various kinds," he
says. "We still have this view of alcohol that is not consistent with
the risks and harms that it poses."

Of course, enforcing liquor laws isn't going to stop young people from
drinking in somebody's basement. But it might help if we stopped
pretending there's something fairly harmless about getting hammered.