Keep it 18

I had a tipple to celebrate when parliament changed the law to let 18 year olds drink alcohol ' in 1999 wasn't it? At last equality had come. No more ridiculous scenes of entire bars being full of illegal patrons, like the situation at Uni. Sense had prevailed over prejudice. Seems a long time ago now, leading me to believe it was a settled issue. But rust never sleeps and neither do the health/anti-drugs lobby. And so off the back of the liquor industry marketing success we have hysteria from the conservatives and the aging youth of pub crawls past (that's my co-blogger Mr Bradbury if you can't guess) demanding that rights given should be taken away. This is a created panic. There is a lot of studies and surveys and data being peddled by the varoius sides, the problem is people recognise the booze companies conflict of interestbut not the other side and their agenda and what it means. The fact is the health lobby are zealots that manipulate data to serve the ends of theiir crusade. For example. They keep changing the data sets to get the results they want, eg. Classifying all who arrive at hospital rather than those who actualy stay to get treatment and then compare the two without noting thne difference, and the classic cheap shot: reclassifying 'binge drinking' as now being 5 standard drinks when it was 6. )owering the classifications like that makes it nonsense. I distrust the stats created by the health/anti-drugs lobby everybit as much as the. Pro-alcohol lobby, maybe more so. Consistency is important in publikc policy as is good data,. A hard 18 is the best for many reasons as we are defining. Adulthood to a large extent. On this basis I also advocate for the removal of all 18+ restrictions like the R20 on casino floors etc. Keep it 18 As for the other measures to stop over-indulgence, it just seems like a further punishment on the poorer people. Middle class alcoholism is OK apparently. Hearing Charles Chauvel lecture women on drinking alcopops last night on TV was a display of the sort of patronising elitist wanker bullshit that is conservatism whether he understands it or not.