Posts Tagged alcohol
Put that beer down!
Posted by James Gubb in Civil Liberty, Health on 29/01/2009
On the basis of a report by the CMO, Sir Liam Donaldson, the government has recommended that no child should drink before the age of 15; and that children between the 15-17 years should only drink under the supervision of adults.
Manufacturing Concern
Posted by Nick Cowen in Civil Liberty, Crime, Health on 02/05/2007
Last week, Alcohol Concern, ‘the National Agency on Alcohol Misuse’, managed to generate a significant amount of media coverage with its recommendation to ‘make it illegal to provide alcohol to anyone under the age of 15.’ The reasoning behind this was that since unsupervised consumption of alcohol is spiralling, along with associated anti-social behaviour, among young people, the natural solution is to imprison parents who offer a thimble of wine to their child at the dinner table.
When faced with that as a consequence of their proposal on the BBC’s Today programme, Alcohol Concern’s spokesperson argued that the change in the law was still necessary in order to ‘send a message’. I am not sure what sort of message about this society would be sent out if Jewish Passover services (where every family member is encouraged to drink a traditional sweet red wine throughout the evening) were raided by the police, but I doubt the delinquents in town centres will see the relevance to them. The alternative ‘message’, that such laws won’t be enforced to the letter so best to work out one’s own interpretation of justice would be the likely unintended consequence.