Statistics are really just the observation of what most of us know already, but they do help to put a face to the world we live in.
We see the damage in our communities, the anger problems, road rage, breakdown of families, abused kids, sexual assaults, rapes in and out of family circles, vandalism, late night fights and damage, drunken pregnancies, random sex, lots of tears and broken people and the highest suicide rate in the world in Aotearoa.
Is that it? Not by a long shot...
STATS
- Alcohol-related crime accounts for a third of all police apprehensions
- 70% of all emergency hospital admissions are due to alcohol
- $425 million was paid out by ACC for alcohol-related injuries in 2007
- half of all serious violent crimes are related to alcohol
- the cost to the public health sector is $655 million a year (which is up to 10% of the health budget), and perhaps the most telling statistic is that
- 90% of the total of 8000 prison inmates have an alcohol or drug problem.
- According to a Massey University study of 16,500 people published in the New Zealand Medical Journal nearly 7 per cent of men and 3 per cent of women had been physically assaulted in the previous year. One in 100 women had been sexually assaulted, and one in 200 men. More than half the physical and sexual assaults were by people who had been drinking.
- Alcohol consumption also increased people's chances of being a victim. The research suggested there were more than 62,000 assaults every year by people who had been drinking alcohol.
It is essential that we address these issues through a new approach to the law. The Kiwi Party is making a submission on that now to the Law Commission, as are many others. I don't hate alcohol, but I'm not stupid either. It is destroying the people we love in this nation. I lost many years myself as a 'last one standing social drinker' (that's perhaps French for 'chronic alcoholic') and damaged many people along the way, I knew better all along but 'under the influence' means just that. That influence needs to be stopped.
RESEARCH
Research just released by a team from Melbourne's Murdoch Children's Research Institute says its study, which has tracked 1520 young people's drinking habits over more than 10 years from mid-teens to mid-20s, shows there is no safe or sensible level of drinking for adolescents in light of later likely events.
National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines define a low-risk level of drinking for adults as fewer than three standard drinks a day. The research found teenagers, drinking at even this level, increased their chances of alcohol abuse, social or legal problems or alcohol-related high-risk sexual behaviour 10 years down the track.
Those who abstained from any alcohol in adolescence experienced fewer (bad) alcohol-related outcomes than those who drank at the recommended level.
The research, published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, found that by young adulthood, 27 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women met at least one of the criteria for alcohol abuse and risky sexual behaviour.
The age at which children begin drinking appears to be linked to their later propensity for harmful drinking, with the chances of becoming alcohol-dependent decreasing by 14% for each year of delay in the onset of alcohol use. (Spear, L.P., The adolescent brain and age-related behavioral manifestations, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 24 (2000) 417-463).
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