What a Carry On

I'm sat here with the TV on half listening to a program on the late, great Kenneth Williams and it has got me to thinking about the latest headlines appearing in the Daily Mail this week.

Firstly the Oxford study claiming that 3 in 100 lives will be saved by reducing alcohol intake when looking at the 11 most common reasons for death in the UK.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2152424/Dont-drink-quarter-pint-DAY-Oxford-study-claims-slashing-official-alcohol-limit-save-4-500-lives-year.html

However this commentator thinks that this is a rather strange comment to focus upon when the reality is that the other 97 people in that 100 will still die prematurely. Look let's face it we drink too much in the UK. We're not as bad as some in the world who consume more but we are the worst in the world in the way in which we consume the alcohol.

It is Binge Drinking that really causes the problem in this country. Our bodies are simply not designed to cope with large amounts of alcohol in short spaces of time.


Physiologically speaking the group of enzymes that control the degradation of alcohol, the alcohol dehydrogenase family, are in limited supply in the human body. We know only a little about how they work and we cannot reproduce them on mass in tablet form. Put simply they are a miracle of nature that nature doesn't want mankind to make artificially. So nature has actually designed a defence mechanism against alcohol in small quantities but not for large quantities in a short space of time.

If you drink 24 units in 3 hours, roughly the equivalent of 7 to 8 pints of an average lager or cider in the UK, compared to drinking the same evenly over a 24 hour period then you cause about 33 times more damage to your body. Do it on a regular basis and you're storing up trouble for the future. If nature had not designed us to deal with small amounts of alcohol then no mechanism of coping would have ever evolved.

Now the second thing that caught my eye was a piece on Professor David Nutt. Now I like this guy and I think he is misrepresented a lot of the time but he doesn't understand the nature of drinking and driving if he thinks that putting an alcohol immobiliser in all cars will stop drinking and driving and change our national drinking habits as a byproduct.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2152586/Alcohol-sensors-cars-compulsory-says-controversial-professor-claimed-Ecstasy-safer-drink.html

A quick look at the internet tells anyone that a child of five with the right inexpensive kit can run around even the classiest of immobilisers. A serious drink driver will soon find a way around such a device and then where will we be left. If all cars have such a device then the police would have no idea who may or may not be under the influence. Before he starts talking about a world he simply has no real experience in he really needs to talk to those of us who do, and that means me. So if you want to drop me a line Professor please feel free.

The key to drinking and driving, and I've said this repeatedly, is a six fold plan that can only be implemented by Government action. It involves technology, yes, but that without effective public transport, effective education, a public psyche change to social intolerance, effective policing and effective punishment, it would not work.

Alcohol professionals in the UK well matron it really is a carry on.