There are ideas to try to free up police time, energy and resources, by plonking drunks into privately run drunk tanks, for which they would be subsequently charged up to £400.
I like this.
It is the embryo of a sensible approach to a crisis we have on our hands.
Anybody who has needed medical assistance from an Accident and Emergency department will know how they were competing for attention with a continuous stream of abusive, aggressive, disruptive and self-inflected injuries of the drunk and drugged.
People who are genuinely ill and in need of help are dying because of the distraction and drain these anti-social arseholes put on the limited resources available to everybody.
Despite installing security guards for most of the day, a cost the NHS could do without, medical staff will still be attacked and injured just for trying to go about their duties of helping the ill and injured.
Alcohol abuse is bad everywhere, but in Liverpool it is extremely bad. Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights the ambulance service is dealing almost 100% with alcohol and drug abusers. There is little time left to deal with normal people. Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights are not the best time to be taken genuinely ill and need to be rushed to hospital in Liverpool. Or anywhere.
The problem seems to be that people don’t understand that there is a lot of enjoyment to be had without any need to be so drunk or so drugged that they have to be taken to hospital. Yet, culturally, British people don’t stop the cycle of peer pressure to get off their heads. And the peer pressure is immense. It’s almost impossible to resist.
Any young person daring to say they don’t drink or do drugs is told to their face that they are a freak. And of course they will use social media to attack the ‘freaks’ or, in some cases, actually physically attack their homes. Possibly the only ones able to get away with not drinking or doing drugs are the ones who can claim to have been alcoholic and / or drug addicts for decades, and now in remission.
Nobody just accepts that some people chose not to drink or drug themselves into unconsciousness. Even those who have a few drinks, or a few good drags on a spliff, are chastised for holding back and not going far enough. The younger a person is, the louder his or her peer group will intimidate him or her to get off their head. It’s one of those cultural things that seems very hard to get round.
What is needed is a move towards making it acceptable to say ‘no’. And, there need to be places to go and things to do that give a natural high, the high that young children get just from mucking around and ‘playing’.
Peer pressure is so evil that it makes out that a person not drinking is incapable of enjoying themselves as much as those who are off their heads. This needs to be flipped round so that it’s the drunks and druggies that are thought of as the oddities because they can’t cope with having fun whilst facing reality. In so many ways, normals are more likely to enjoy themselves far much more than the arseholes.
So, yes, alongside drunk tanks, huge fines and stigmatising the arseholes who make life unbearable for normals, there needs to be an education about how it’s ok to be normal. In Liverpool there’s an alcohol and drug free ‘bar’ and food place called The Brink (more here). It is always full and a lively place, where people can enjoy themselves drug and drink free. Essentially, it was built for ex-drinkers and ex-druggies who wanted a conventional social life, but away from the things that they became addicted to. However, it is also a refuge for those who just don’t want to be put under peer pressure to drink or drug themselves, and for those who don’t want to be surrounded by annoying drunk or stoned people.
The destigmatising of normals and the stigmatising of the arseholes needs to start in schools. Children need to be told that it is perfectly ok and perfectly normal to not want to be an annoying arsehole as they get older. And there need to be far many more places like The Brink that become the norm rather than the alcohol-intense dives the alcies and druggies frequent.
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