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01 February 2012
Alcoholics tell counsellor that drink is too cheap
By Sandra Quinn
ALCOHOL is too cheap and it is getting harder for people who are struggling with addiction problems to say no to 24 cans of beer for €24.
This is according to a Waterford City addiction counsellor, Barry Grant, who said that for his clients who may be on the dole or unemployed, they can get two days drinking from just over €20.
He said, “When they can get that much alcohol for so little, the slab of cans is probably cheaper than the bottles of fizzy water beside it, so unfortunately people tend to go for the alcohol.”
Speaking about the new regulations that the Government is considering, Mr. Grant said that the measures may help to reduce alcoholism, but it will take a lot more than cutting the number of adverts and selling it in a different place to combat the alcohol culture in Ireland.
In relation to advertising, he said that alcohol brands sponsoring big sporting events is a huge problem here.
He said, “With things like the Heineken Cup, you have small children associating alcohol with positive healthy images of sports people achieving goals.”
Mr. Grant added, “Even the drink aware ads tell you to ‘enjoy’ alcohol responsibly, but if there were ads telling you to ‘enjoy’ heroin responsibly, there would be uproar. The word ‘enjoy’ shouldn’t be used, why not say ‘use’ or ‘consume’ – even in the health warning, there is a bit of a sales pitch.”
He said that people see the cheaply priced drink and they don’t see the full effects of what it could do to them.
He said, “I would deal with a lot of family members of alcoholics and their lives have been turned upside down.”
Mr. Grant said that the Government could be trying to move towards the Swedish model of selling alcohol in one place only, but that doesn’t eradicate the alcohol problem.
He said that in Sweden, the sale of alcohol is heavily restricted, but they still have a huge societal problem with alcohol addiction.
Mr. Grant said that as a country, we have moved away from the culture of drinking in the pub to drinking wine at home in the evenings, and that people have become much more casual about their drinking.
He said, “People don’t take the unit limit seriously and they could be drinking two or three times the limit, without thinking that anything is wrong.”
It is recommended that men drink no more than 21 units per week, and for women the limit is 14 per week.
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