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On the weekend I watched a movie that touched on the issue of social host liability.
(In the USA, adults who provide alcohol to a minor or serve intoxicated adults can be held responsible for damages or injury caused by them.)
After I recovered from the realisation that alcohol policy has managed to infiltrate even my social life, I realised that often I’m so caught up in my Australian bubble that I don’t pay much attention to what’s happening around the world. Unless it has direct implications for my work, that is.
GrogWatch rarely deviates beyond the coasts of our fair country. In fact since I’ve been editing it, I don’t think if it ever has. Which got me wondering - what IS going on?
Read for yourself:
In Wales, parents who have lost children to drink-drivers are calling for zero blood alcohol content for drivers. MPs sitting on the House of Commons Transport Committee have said that “in the long term, we believe that the Government should aim for an ‘effectively zero’ limit of 20mg but we acknowledge that is too great a step at this stage.”
In the USA, after multiple hospitalisations of college students around the country and bans by four state governments, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has launched an official investigation into the safety of adding caffeine to alcoholic beverages. Four manufacturers have ceased importing and producing caffeinated alcoholic beverages after the FDA issued warning letters.
In Scotland, the Conservatives are calling on the Scottish Government to ensure the ban on below-cost-price sales of alcohol set out in a recent Treasury paper will also apply in Scotland. The Health Secretary has been to urged her to use processes within the Scottish Parliament to incorporate the ban as part of a strategy to tackle the country's drinking culture.
In Israel, less than a quarter of Israeli women are aware of the risk of drinking alcohol during pregnancy. Of a poll of 4000 women, more than a fifth of the women surveyed said it was permissible to drink alcohol during pregnancy. More than 15 percent of the 4,000 women polled admitted to having drunk alcohol during pregnancy, while a third said they knew women who did so.
In Russia, the ‘demon squirrel’, a cautionary ad about the effects of alcohol, has been released. Part of the Kremlin’s toughest anti-alcohol campaign since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ad was released after a decision to introduce a minimum price for a half-litre bottle of vodka and to reduce the blood alcohol content for drivers to zero.
I wouldn’t say there’s anything particularly surprising in there (apart from maybe the demon squirrel). Any one of those stories could be from Australia. There’s something almost soothing about the consistency of it. We’re all fighting the same battle, and employing (or trying to employ) the same strategies.
Until next week,
Sarah Jaggard
Community Mobilisation Policy Officer
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