Alcohol abuse - Drinking ourselves to death

INTERNATIONAL reports on alcohol abuse invariably turn the spotlight on Ireland and, according to the latest survey, Irish people are drinking themselves to death.

Medical experts have issued dire warnings over the speed of Ireland's race to the top of the European league for alcohol consumption.

According to a comparative study of drinking habits across Europe, published in the influential Lancet medical journal, record numbers of Irish people and Britons, particularly Scots, are drinking themselves into an early grave.

For centuries, the demon drink has been inextricably woven with personal and family difficulties. Today, it lies behind an upsurge of ever more violent crime, including sexual assaults and unprovoked attacks on innocent victims, and drink is also blamed for one in every three deaths on the roads.

The litany of other harmful consequences of drinking to excess includes depression, suicide, serious medical disorders - from heart disease to high blood pressure, hypertension and deadly liver cirrhosis financial problems and absenteeism.

Recently, the price of heavy drinking was graphically illustrated in the lingering death of soccer legend George Best. Booze is also central to the crisis now engulfing Charles Kennedy, whose leadership of Britain's Liberal Democrat party is in the balance following his gamble of admitting he is an alcoholic.

Arguably, the most alarming aspect of the Lancet report is that deaths from drink-related liver cirrhosis among men and women in Ireland has virtually doubled since the late 1950s.

Making for bleak reading, the figures show death rates from cirrhosis per 100,000 people climbed from 5.4 for men and 3.9 for women between 1957 and 1961, to 7.8 and 5.3 between 1987 and 1991 and had jumped to 11.1 for men and 6.5 for women between 1997 and 2001.

Another worrying side of this problem is the escalating trend of binge drinking among teenagers and even younger children in this country.

According to the ISPCC, children as young as 12 have been treated for problems relating to both alcohol and cannabis abuse. It is now an accepted fact of life that almost every child will come into contact with alcohol and drugs during their schooldays.

Against this depressing backdrop, the Government has rightly come in for criticism for leaving it up to the drink industry to police itself under "strict voluntary codes of practice" of course in relation to alcohol advertising and young people.

Inevitably, government ministers had been lobbied intensively by the industry, which argued that a ban on advertising was unnecessary because companies would operate voluntary codes of practice.

The coalition's capitulation gives a hollow ring to assurances from Health Minister Mary Harney that if the voluntary codes were not honoured, she would look again at legislating for alcohol advertising.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people, aware of the dangers of glamorising alcohol, are strongly in favour of introducing tougher controls over promotional advertising.

In effect, the coalition's stated commitment to legislating for controls on alcohol ads a policy initiative personally supported by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was so diluted it descended into farce.

The resulting code, which purports to reduce the exposure of children to alcohol advertising, sponsorship and promotions by ensuring drink is not glamorised in TV and cinema, is entirely voluntary another convenient Irish solution to a frightening Irish problem.