Grading the Anti-Drink Adverts

We all drink too much, you know. Oh yes we do. If we keep on drinking the way we do, then society's going to collapse and everyone's going to die and Dublin will quite possibly explode, spattering the rest of the country with alcopops and black claggy Guinness-shit. You know this is true, because until recently Ireland was teetotal and Guinness was only invented in 2001.

Course, the main symptom of the latest we-all-drink-too-much campaign is the I've Had Enough adverts, which are staring obnoxiously out at you from all manner of buses and billboards. Unfortunately I've not been able to take any photos of these, because staring at them reduces me into a fury that renders me incapable of any motor functions whatsoever. So instead I've managed to find the video here, for any readers who don't feel they've been preached at quite enough today.

(Course, you do have to wonder exactly what the Drinkaware website thinks it's going to achieve. As if someone who likes going out on the batter every night is going to come across it and say "ooh, I didn't realise drinking was bad for you...")

Anyway, leaving that aside, it's time to grade the posters.

1: "I don't feel safe if I'm out when you're out of it."
That's the one with the incredibly pale woman looking earnest. The verbiage is obviously messy, and she looks so helpless and whiny that you want to slap her anyway. It's touchingly sexist to see women portrayed as helpless waifs who need protecting by menfolk, but you do wonder how a drunken, falling-down bloke is more frightening than - say - a serial-killer in full control of his motor-functions. Besides which, the obvious answer is for her to go home. It's not like anyone's going to miss her sparkling company, the moany cow.
Effectiveness: 2/10

2: "28% of the people I treat in A&E have alcohol-related injuries".
This is the nurse, who also looks like a cheery sort. There's way too many problems with this to list, but hell, I'll have a go anyway. First of all, I don't believe the 28% statistic in the first place. I'll happily believe that 28% of people in A&E show up drunk, but that's not at all the same thing; if you get beaten up by a mugger while heading home after a few pints, then it's no more "alcohol-related" than coming off your bike is "lycra-related" - alcohol-related, to me, suggests getting hit over the head with a bottle of vodka. Secondly, if you are the type of person who's going to wind up in hospital due to alcohol intake, then you've probably paid about seven hundred quid's worth of taxes into the exchequer, which is more than enough to cover an A&E visit. Thirdly...

No, it's no good, I'm going to need a new paragraph. The really annoying thing about this advert is that treating injured people is her job, and complaining why they're there isn't. There's thousands of people who go out, get drunk, and then go home without going near a hospital, so it's not like alcohol's the core problem. If you take a bunch of young people who've been culturally trained to be aggressive, belligerent and not to give a shit about anyone else because no-one else gives a shit about them, then of course they're going to start knocking lumps out of each other on a Saturday night. Drunkenness has very little to do with it - I've met several people who are arseholes when they're drunk, but they're also complete arseholes when they're sober. But trying to convince society to, you know, not be complete cunts to each other is difficult, whereas happily blaming alcohol use is very easy. And the medical profession is trained to blame more or less everything on alcohol, for broadly similar reasons. The 28% of people who come into misery-nurse's sphere actually have fuckwit-related injuries, but that's a bit trickier to solve.

The obvious way to complete this would be to point out that I have a close relationship with alcohol, i.e. if it was a man I'd happily perform fellatio on it, but I've never been taken drunk to A&E in my life. Unfortunately, this isn't true. I did once go to A&E drunk... but it was because I had an asthma attack, and the thought that I might be one of the 28% is possibly what annoys me so much. Still, any mention of A&E will probably get some people onside.

Effectiveness: 5/10

3: "Why should my night in be ruined by your night out?"
This is the one with the grumpy-looking old guy (although I'd be grumpy-looking if I had a dressing gown like that too). I'm not sure what point it's trying to make, really; I've no idea why I'm runing his night in, I've never seen him before in my life. And I'm not sorry.

Effectiveness: 2/10

4: "You get wasted and my cab gets wrecked."
...and you charge me fifty quid to clean your cab up, so I'm not bursting with sympathy here. I'm not sure what bright spark decided that people will stop drinking out of sympathy for cab drivers, who are - for no apparent reason - probably one of the most disliked professions in the country. "You get wasted and I find it easier to drive you to a secluded spot, rape you, and take your money" would probably have caught the national mood better. Especially since most cab drivers look like Northsiders, and they're all muggers really. They eat human flesh in Finglas, you know.

Effectiveness: 0/10

5: "Why should my first job in the morning be cleaning up after your night out?"
Ermm... because you're a cleaner? Actually he's not, he's a shopkeeper, or so the video reveals. He seems to be getting very annoyed about running a scrubbing brush over his outside wall, which looks like it'll take him about five minutes. Yeah, there's social injustice for you; cleaning up a small vomit-stain makes, say, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge seem minor in comparison.

Effectiveness: 1/10

So I don't really think this is going to spontaneously change our behaviour, until Ireland as a nation becomes known - once again - as being peaceful and sober. I still think the best solution to the "binge-drinking problem" is to make it compulsory, but no-one seems to listen.