We're Queensland's Biggest Drinkers

Sunshine Coast Daily

GOLDEN beaches, beautiful weather, rivers of booze.

It is unlikely this description will ever find its way on to a Sunshine Coast tourism brochure.

However, some would argue it is apt in light of an alarming new report which found the Coast is lagging behind the rest of the state when it comes to alcohol-free days.

The 2009 Queensland Health report found 65.6% of Coast residents have at least five alcohol-free days, compared with the state average of 70.1%.

The Coast figure is the worst in the state.

Coast-based responsible-drinking campaigners were not surprised by the figures, saying the region has a drinking mentality in keeping with its laid-back lifestyle.

Dave, the past district officer of Alcoholics Anonymous on the Coast, said the Queensland Health report was a further sign the authorities needed a new strategy in dealing with what the region’s “escalating” alcohol problem.

He said police too readily turned a blind eye to public drinking, especially at parks.

“We quite often go down to Happy Valley on a Sunday for coffee, and when I look around the park they’d be two families not drinking out of 60 families – and usually most people there are families,” he said.

“They say you’re not allowed to drink in public, but you drive around any park anywhere on the Sunshine Coast and people are drinking.

“You don’t have to be a statistician to realise alcohol consumption here is huge.”

Associate professor David Ward is a specialist emergency physician at Nambour General Hospital who speaks regularly on the negative impact of Australia’s drinking culture on society.

Dr Ward sees first-hand the devastating effects of alcohol on society and said the current approach to dealing with the problem was not working.

“Certainly, at the hospital we see the end point of it – the amount of road-trauma accidents and other accidents relating to alcohol,” he said. “If anything, it’s deteriorating.”

Most Coast residents who spoke to the Daily yesterday admitted to drinking every day.

Mal O’Malley, of Maroochydore, works in the building industry and said he liked a drink each day.

“If I’m working, I’ll probably have three schooners in the afternoon and go home and have one or two,” he said.

“On the weekend it’s different – I drink more.”

Stephanie Pratt Sentenced to Three Years Probation

People Magazine

Stephanie Pratt reached a plea deal with Los Angeles prosecutors in her DUI case Thursday.

The Hills star, 23, was sentenced to three years informal probation, completion of a 12-week alcohol education program, as well as three Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a week for eight weeks, and will pay a fine.

DUI charges were dropped in exchange for a no contest plea to one count of misdemeanor "exhibition of speed."

On the issue of whether she attended rehab, "Ms. Pratt voluntarily sought help from a doctor regarding substance issues but the doctor recommended that she didn't need rehab," Pratt's lawyer Jon Bryant Artz tells PEOPLE.

Following her Oct. 18 arrest, in which she was pulled over after attending Holly Montag's birthday party, Pratt said the incident "was the worst thing to happen to me and, at the same time, it was the biggest blessing" as a life lesson.

In Moscow, Alcoholics Anonymous Begins To Raise The Curtain

NY Times

As they settled into chairs in a dingy room on the city's eastern outskirts, the leader pounded on the table and brought the group to order with words that remain extraordinary in this country.

"My name is Vera," she said, "and I am an alcoholic."

More than half a century after being founded in the United States, and seven years after its tentative introduction here, Alcoholics Anonymous is slowly taking root in Russia, a country whose alcohol problem is seen by health experts as among the worst in the world.

"The state doesn't support us, and there are still very few doctors who work with us," said Vera, who spoke about her involvement in the groupon the condition that only her first name be used. "There's still relatively little information available even among specialists about alcoholism. But we can provide what official treatments never have, which is to help alcoholics learn to live as healthy people."

When the first group was formed here in 1987, a newspaper article suggested it was a C.I.A. front. The paranoia has faded, and there are now 70 A.A. groups meeting regularly across Russia and Ukraine, the movement's organizers said. But it is still very much a novelty in Russia.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the nation's best-known teetotaler, ran a temperance campaign while he was leader of the Soviet Union. It failed. Recent tax increases on vodka have had little effect but to drive drinkers to moonshine, chemicals and any other substances containing alcohol, causing the rate of death from alcohol poisoning to double in the last two years.

Traditional treatment for alcoholism has been the police drunk tank or medical "cures" of dubious value. Public debate about the drinking habits of President Boris N. Yeltsin has given the issue increased visibility -- "Your fondness for liquor is a secret only to yourself," one newspaper columnist wrote this week in an open letter to Mr. Yeltsin -- but counselors said that even private acknowledgment of alcoholism, much less a public pronouncement, remains anathema to most Russians.

Nonetheless, on this night, the cross-section of Muscovites attending the open A.A. meeting in the basement of an apartment building in the Novogireyevo neighborhood welcomed one another warmly, and one by one, gave their first names and identified themselves as alcoholics.

The group's 35 members ranged from teen-age girls to retired men, from entrepreneurs in sharp clothes to down-and-outers. Some said they had been sent by clinics. Others said they had heard of A.A. on the radio or in newspaper articles. Some said they were sober. Some were clearly drunk.

Sasha said he had been having a bad day, and provoked howls of sympathetic laughter when he said it had been made much worse by the recent plunge in the value of the ruble. Andrei talked about having been invited out by some old school friends, and of his relief at not being able to go, since they never would have understood his desire not to drink.

Nikolai, swaying, reeking of alcohol and with an open cut on his forehead, stood up and boasted that he had been sober for two months. The group hooted and told him to sit down.

Igor said that his sister and brother-in-law had asked him to leave the room they were providing him, and that he feared ending up sleeping on the street again in the rain and the mud.

"I feel I need a drink," he said. "I want a drink. But coming here I feel much better."

The movement's organizers in Russia said A.A. had been introduced into the country by representatives from the United States and Europe who came here in the mid-1980's, during Mr. Gorbachev's unsuccessful anti-alcohol campaign, to talk with doctors, the police, substance-abuse counselors and hospitals.

The group seems to be most appreciated by those members who are old enough to have been alcoholics under Communist rule.

Felix, who works at a research institute, said he was officially registered by the authorities as an alcoholic during the Brezhnev era. His name was kept on a list by the local police. Occasionally he would have to go to a hospital, where he was given injections or pills that were supposed to keep him from drinking.

"I was controlled only by fear," Felix said. "Now, coming here to A.A., I feel no fear at all. This way is much better."

But even among the younger members, the group appears to be meeting a need that neither the Government nor the medical establishment has addressed.

Igor, who discussed his fear of being thrown out by his sister and brother-in-law, said he started drinking 18 years ago, when he was 12. He was in and out of jail for years on robbery charges -- he said alcohol and drugs were easy to get in prison -- before deciding a few years ago to go straight.

"I got rid of my criminal connections," Igor said. "Somehow alcohol was harder."

After bouncing in and out of drunk tanks and hospitals, he was sent to alcoholics anonymous. six months ago by a counselor.

"It completely changed my life," Igor said. "The first time I came here, I'd been drunk for two months. I didn't understand much at that time, but I felt the warmth radiating from these people."

"Here I can tell these people my problems," he said. "Problems that I tried to talk about in the past to people who wouldn't listen." (Gleb Kosorukov for The New York Times)

Russian Drinkers Receive Higher Vodka Prices From Government

The Washington Post

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Minimum prices for vodka took effect in Russia on Friday as part of President Dmitry Medvedev's campaign to combat alcoholism at a time when Russians traditionally drink heavily during the New Year and Orthodox Christmas holidays.

The price of the cheapest half-liter vodka bottle will nearly double to a new minimum of 89 roubles ($2.95), according to the alcohol regulator's website www.fsrar.ru

In the run-up to the New Year festivities, Moscow's supermarkets carried vast selections of vodka with luxury brands priced more than ten times above the new minimum. But elsewhere the cheapest vodka could be bought for 51 roubles.

Russia's lengthy New Year and Orthodox Christmas holidays, lasting from January 1 to 11, are traditionally marked by bumper alcohol consumption.

Successive Russian and Soviet leaders have tried before to reduce the country's drinking habit, with alcoholism blamed for the low life expectancy of Russian men.

In August, Medvedev ordered tough measures to curb alcohol abuse, saying he was shocked by official data showing the average Russian drank 18 liters (38 pints) of pure alcohol each year.

Since then, Russia has moved to triple the excise duty on beer and is considering drastic limits on where and when beer can be sold, such as banning the sale on street side kiosks.

There are also plans to raise duties for vodka, but these are separate measures that do not take effect yet.

The government said the measures were aimed "to reduce the level of alcohol dependency of the population," when it announced the plans on November 19.

Water or Vodka?

 The average monthly salary of 18,702 roubles ($651) would have bought 368 bottles of the cheapest vodka available before the New Year in an online supermarket, but 210 bottles now.

In 1985, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared a war on the traditional evil of alcohol abuse, ordering dramatic cuts in the production of wines and spirits and introducing strict controls on public consumption of alcohol.

The campaign triggered a surge in illegal production of low-quality home-brewed booze and the curbs dealt a blow to the popularity of Gorbachev, the author of the liberal Soviet reform known as Perestroika.

The Moscow office of Alcoholics Anonymous stated that they continue their efforts to fight alcoholism in Russia, as they do throughout much of the world.

Binge Drinking Especially Dangerous For The Unaccustomed

The Sun - Inland Empire

For certain events, society provides encouragement for alcohol abuse.

And New Year's Eve ranks at the top, says Bob Forrest, chemical dependency program director at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena.

A vocalist for Los Angeles bands Thelonious Monster and The Bicycle Thief, Forrest has been a member of the treatment team on VH1's "Celebrity Rehab" and its spinoff, "Sober House."

An obsession to turn every day into New Year's Eve is the dividing line between a non-alcoholic and someone in need of alcohol treatment, he said.

But the non-alcoholic who gives into the urge to binge drink has as much to fear on New Year's Eve.

People who are unaccustomed to drinking have a lower tolerance for alcohol, said Dr. Marc Eckstein, medical director of the Los Angeles Fire Department and associate professor of emergency medicine at USC's Keck School of Medicine.

Eckstein has seen alcoholics with blood alcohol levels of between .400 and .500 sitting up and talking.

He has seen college students with blood alcohol levels of .100 in a state respiratory collapse.

In California, driving with a blood-alcohol content of .08 or above is one of two ways to be convicted of a DUI. The other is being an impaired driver.

The difference has to do with how the liver works to neutralize the toxic effects of alcohol. When the liver is exposed to alcohol regularly, it builds up enzymes to neutralize this bloodstream invader, Eckstein said.

People who do not have this buildup are more easily overwhelmed by it.

Women appear to be more susceptible to alcohol than men, but the reason may be as simple as they tend to weigh less than men and the amount of the enzyme needed to neutralize alcohol is proportional to body weight, said Thomas Otis, a neurobiologist at UCLA who has been researching alcohol's effects on the brain.

Eckstein cautions that when you see someone sleeping after drinking, try to wake them. If you can't, call 9-1-1.

This unconsciousness is likely the result of alcohol poisoning, he said.

Alcohol - a central nervous system depressant - deadens the gag reflex, setting up a potentially fatal situation.

If the "sleeping" person vomits - and they often do - they can breathe that into their lungs and asphyxiate.

In less frequent cases, alcohol may shut down breathing altogether, he said.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism notes, in a publication about New Year's Eve traffic deaths, that many New Year's revelers get into trouble because they do not recognize that driving-related skills and decision-making abilities are diminished long before physical signs of intoxication occur.

Revelers also frequently believe that they can drive safely once drinking has stopped.

Dr. Rodney W. Borger, chairman of the department of emergency medicine at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton, said that eating can help people to sober up, perhaps 5 percent to 10 percent faster.

Even after someone stops drinking, alcohol in the stomach continues to enter the bloodstream, according to the NIAAA. Judgment and coordination can be impaired for hours.

And driving home at night is especially dangerous - natural drowsiness is magnified by alcohol's depressant action, according to the NIAAA.

Driving abilities may even be impaired the next day, when alcohol remaining in the system, a headache or disorientation associated with hangovers, works against them.

Sobering Up Myths and Facts

MYTH: You can drive as long as you are not slurring words or acting erratically.

FACT: The skills and coordination needed for driving are compromised long before the obvious signs of intoxication are visible. Also, the sedative effects of alcohol combined with late-night hours place you at much greater risk of nodding off or losing attention behind the wheel.

MYTH: Drink coffee because the caffeine will sober you up.

FACT: Caffeine may help with drowsiness, but it doesn't counteract the effect of alcohol on decision-making or coordination. The body needs time to break down alcohol and even more time to return to normal.

SOURCE: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism

No Booze At Jets-Bengals Game

The Star-Ledger

The Jets announced Wednesday that there will be no alcohol served at Sunday night's game against the Bengals at the Meadowlands.

Team spokesman Bruce Speight said the team makes the decision on a game-by-game basis and arrived at this decision after consulting with the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority.

Speight said the decision was made, in part, because it's a night game, it's the final game of the season and it's the last game at Giants Stadium and there were concerns about fan behavior.

Iron Man 3 To Feature Alcoholism

Digital Spy

Iron Man comic book artist Bob Layton has claimed that the third movie in the blockbuster franchise could see superhero Tony Stark slip into alcoholism.

Layton, who co-created the War Machine character and consulted on the script for the forthcoming Iron Man movie, suggested that a further sequel will be based on the 'Demon In A Bottle' storyline from the original Marvel comics.

He told MTV: "I think they've come up with a terrific segue to the third film, which I think is going to be fairly powerful. My understanding is that the third film could very well be the 'Demon In A Bottle' story mixed in there with everything and I'm kind of looking forward to that, if that's where they wind up going."

Iron Man 2, starring Robert Downey Jr, Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson and Mickey Rourke, opens in the UK on April 30.