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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Aussies, Yanks may think they're big drinkers – but Brits easily booze them under the table
The top ten per cent of Australia's boozy population downs more than half of the alcohol consumed in the country, according to new research – and the Brits are even worse.
Two researchers from the La Trobe University, Australia, uncovered the eye popping statistic from two surveys: the 2013 International Alcohol Control Study and the 2016 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, as well as more recent research work.
"We found that the heaviest drinking 10 per cent of Australians drink 54.4 per cent of all alcohol consumed in Australia," said Michael Livingston, co-author of the paper published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health and an alcohol policy expert at La Trobe University, on Thursday this week.
The paper also highlighted the intoxicating habits of other countries too. The US fares slightly worse. Ten per cent of America's population guzzled about 55 per cent of all the boozy beverages. But it looked even more diabolical for the Brits - just four per cent of its population glugged a whopping 30 per cent of all its alcohol and they easily outpace Aussies and Americans.
Livingston and his colleague Sarah Callinan, also a researcher at La Trobe's Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, found that Australia's top alcoholics were more likely to be middle-aged men living in rural areas.
"We know that rural areas have disproportionately high levels of consumption and alcohol-related harm compared to metropolitan areas. We found that 16 per cent of this heavy-drinking subset live in outer regional and remote areas, compared with 10 per cent of other drinkers."
[...] "Clearly government has a responsibility to address the problem of cheap alcohol by fixing the way alcohol is taxed, introducing floor prices and halting the proliferation of harm-causing packaged alcohol sales," he said./p>
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday April 21 2019, @01:09AM (2 children)
You misread me. I am saying that any possible solution to this, even if it makes financial sense like a housing-first approach to the majority of homeless who simply need housing, will be derided as "socialism." Mostly by people who would not recognize socialism if it came up to them and smacked them across their crooked inbred teeth so hard they swallowed all three of them.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 21 2019, @01:21AM (1 child)
For the "hard" cases that seem to just not quit drinking in destructive patterns and amounts, I think the real answer is some therapy with a drug component--one that rewires the brain away from alcohol dependency. Who knows what the drug will be, but I believe history has shown that once you understand the biochemistry of the problem, you can start to treat it. We are still in the dark ages of alcohol abuse treatment, rather like how we treated mental conditions before anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, or stimulants for ADHD.
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Sunday April 21 2019, @05:49AM
Anti-alcohol addiction medicines exist. Source: https://www.aafp.org/afp/2005/1101/p1775.html [aafp.org]