Drugs! Drugs! Drugs!

[Sasaki Kojiro]

There are a lot of alcohol problems round here, the Scottish Parliament is wanting to go the route of Sweden and get a state monopoly on alcohol sales and hike the prices up.

I heard that parts of Scotland and Norther Ireland have the highest number of teetotalers in Europe, yet also the highest levels of alcohol consumption per person. You do the maths...

Buckfast does not seem to help. In a survey last year of 172 prisoners at a young offenders’ institution, 43 percent of the 117 people who drank alcohol before committing their crimes said they had drunk Buckfast. In a study of litter in a typical housing project, 35 percent of the items identified were Buckfast bottles. And the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them).

A spokesman for J. Chandler & Company, which distributes the drink, said that Buckfast accounted for less than 1 percent of the alcoholic beverage market in Scotland and was being unfairly singled out. Nor, he said, is wine-making a sign that the monks of Buckfast Abbey have strayed from the teachings of St. Benedict, an accusation recently leveled by an Episcopal bishop.

“It’s always wise to remember that Jesus turned water into wine,” the spokesman, Jim Wilson, said in an interview.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Buckfast does not seem to help. In a survey last year of 172 prisoners at a young offenders’ institution, 43 percent of the 117 people who drank alcohol before committing their crimes said they had drunk Buckfast. In a study of litter in a typical housing project, 35 percent of the items identified were Buckfast bottles. And the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them).

A spokesman for J. Chandler & Company, which distributes the drink, said that Buckfast accounted for less than 1 percent of the alcoholic beverage market in Scotland and was being unfairly singled out. Nor, he said, is wine-making a sign that the monks of Buckfast Abbey have strayed from the teachings of St. Benedict, an accusation recently leveled by an Episcopal bishop.

“It’s always wise to remember that Jesus turned water into wine,” the spokesman, Jim Wilson, said in an interview.

I have the good fortune of coming from the said Strathclyde region. It's weird... there are a lot of people of Northern Irish descent in my area that took an oath not to drink that was apparently popular over there, and yet the people living right next to them have died drowning in their own puke. I guess we don't do moderation here.

In any case, I'm not a prohibitionist, the bolded part above being one obvious reason why. Although it's worth remembering that prohibition was much more tied to the early Labour movement that it was with religious movements in Scotland.

[Lemur]

Just to kick this conversation in the tender bits, would anyone care to form a cogent argument in favor of the war on drugs and prohibition?

As for the religious justification for drinking, I'm reminded of my convo with my fundie, teetotaling mother-in-law over whether or not alcohol should be served at my wedding: "He didn't change the water into diet cola, now did he?"