AAAAAAAAA

A blog post with every single category marked (I'm doing this for scribefire)

Letting kids drink alcohol

From the department of prohibition-still-doesn't-work:

Over dinner recently, Anna Peele recalls one of the first times she drank alcohol. "I was like 14 or 15," Peele says. "I ordered a beer and they served me."

She had just finished her freshman year of high school and was traveling in Greece with family friends. "We would just have wine with dinner," Peele says. "In Greece it's so not a big deal."

While that experience would cause some American parents to worry, Peele's parents weren't upset.

In fact, starting in middle school, her parents allowed her and her siblings to have an occasional sip of beer or wine. By the time she was in high school, Peele was drinking beer and wine regularly at family functions and social events. But it was always in moderation, Peele says. She says her parents' attitude toward alcohol made it seem less mysterious. "It wasn't some forbidden fruit," Peele says. "I didn't have to go out to a field with my friends and have 18 beers."

Experts say binge drinking continues to be a growing problem across the country. According to a recent report from the U.S. surgeon general, there are nearly 11 million underage drinkers in the United States. Nearly 7.2 million are considered binge drinkers, meaning they drank more than five drinks in one sitting.

In this age of "just say no," some people believe it is time for Americans to reconsider how they teach kids about alcohol. Peele's father is at the top of the list.

"We taught them to drink in a civilized fashion, like a civilized human being," says Stanton Peele, psychologist and author of "Addiction-Proof Your Child."

America's draconian alcohol laws have failed to prevent binge drinking and alcoholism. I find it incredible that Americans can get married and serve in the armed forces when they are 18, but are unable to legally purchase or consume alcohol until they are 21. I also find it incredible that so many dry counties continue to exist.

Psalm 104.14-15 says:

You cause the grass to grow for the livestock
and plants for man to cultivate,
that he may bring forth food from the earth
and wine to gladden the heart of man,
oil to make his face shine
and bread to strengthen man’s heart.

Common Sense Continental drug ingenuity

Back in the 1920s, Americans saw alcohol as so damaging that they outlawed it. The era of prohibition was perhaps the greatest failure in history of trying to stop something just by banning it.

Hard drugs, like Heroin, are illegal to sell and illegal to use. The illicit drug trade costs our society millions of dollars in insurance costs associated with crime, not to mention overcrowded gaols and deaths by overdoses.

Germany has put a heroin trial in place. The idea is that a whole bunch of heroin addicts are given daily injections of clean heroin - diamorphine - in registered clinics (supervised by medical professionals) rather than buying the stuff themselves from "the street" and injecting it themselves.

A similar scheme has been running in Switzerland for ten years.

The result? Less crime, falling rates of addiction and almost no overdoses.

Are we going to try it out? Oh no. If we do that the bogeyman might get us. That and the fact that scientists have proven beyond doubt that Europe completely sucks.

Nguyen Tuong Van, John Howard, Helen Clark

Nguyen Tuong Van is the Australian who was caught a few years ago trafficking drugs into Singapore. Although he should be punished for his crime, Singapore does itself no favours for punishing drug dealers with execution.

In a way, it is true that Nguyen, as a drug dealer, is responsible for the potential deaths of many through drug addiction. Nevertheless, I do not believe that this crime should result in capital punishment. As an Evangelical, I do believe in justice - but in this day and age there is too much that can go wrong when a person is sentenced to death. If the person is eventually discovered to be innocent, then there is no way to pay recompense to a dead person. No system of justice can be free from corruption.

Singapore, if it is to be regarded as a progressive and strong Asian nation, must put aside the death penalty. If Nguyen has committed a crime (which is probably more than likely), then he should be jailed for a long time for his crime.

John Howard appears to be in a lose-lose situation at the moment. On the one hand, he cannot really do anything short of sending the SAS to rescue Nguyen. On the other hand, he does have a cricket-watching date that just happens to conincide with Nguyen's execution. The Sydney Morning Herald, in particular, seems to frown upon Howard's decision to watch the PM's XI during Nguyen's execution - but then again, what can he do?

Howard and others probably should have got their acts together a few years ago when Nguyen was first arrested. The fact that they are getting all uppity about it now is probably due to public and/or media pressure. Nguyen is the third Australian, after Michelle Leslie and Schapelle Corby, to hit the headlines for drug-dealing or drug usage in an Asian country. Nguyen, however, is unlikely to be given much sympathy because he isn't a young attractive white female. Excuse the cynicism, but it's true.

What was totally unexpected was the sudden work of Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, in taking the matter up with Singaporean authorities. I have often said to people that Helen Clark must be a competent person because there is no way she could have made it politics in personality and image alone. Sexist comment? Maybe, but there is no doubt that Clark is hardly the paragon of good looks.

I will always remember the protests in New Zealand when our John Howard came for a visit just as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin. Most New Zealanders opposed the war and gave Howard heaps when he arrived. Helen Clark also told Howard that her nation would not participate - though in a much more diplomatic way.

For me, that visit was a watershed in my attitude towards New Zealand. The New Zealand people and its leadership stood up to Howard and Australia and openly disagreed with them. New Zealand, always in the shadow of its larger colonial brother, was standing on its own two feet and was confident and sure enough to tell Australia where to go. Helen Clark was the PM at the time and so, in many ways, she represented New Zealand's strength to us in Australia who were taking notice.

The fact is that New Zealand - and particularly Helen Clark - owed Australia no favours whatsoever. Yet Helen Clark has now decided to intervene to try to settle an international incident (the Nguyen execution).

Of course, her actions were hardly altruistic. She would gain some level of political mileage from her actions. Nevertheless, she would have lost nothing had she not acted. In many ways, her actions seem to be consistent with certain values and beliefs that I thought had disappeared altogether: the desire for peace, consensus and mutual respect between nations. Since 9/11 I had thought such things had gone out the window, especially with George Bush in America and the insular attitudes of the Howard government.

In short, it was nice to see good old fashioned Aussie values being exhibited - even though it was a New Zealander that was exhibiting them. Times have changed, especially here in Australia.

From the Department of Wha' Happnin?

© 2005 Neil McKenzie Cameron, http://one-salient-oversight.blogspot.com/




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.