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Published: 13 June 2018

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Tom Hardy, who receives a CBE for services to drama, made his name on the big screen with a series of hard man roles.

The 40-year-old actor is known for Inception, Mad Max: Fury Road, Bronson and The Revenant.

The privately-educated star has spoken about how he went off the rails and suffered from alcohol addiction in his youth.

Hardy checked himself into rehab in 2003 and has been clean ever since.

“I went in thinking I’d do it for a little bit until I can go out and drink and people forgive me. But I did my 28 days, and after listening to people who had been through similar circumstances I realised I did have a problem,”

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Published: 06 June 2018

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Author: Mark Gold, MD May 2018 

Supplying alcohol to their adolescent children is not associated with any reduction of harm. Quite the opposite—parents who allow and support adolescent drinking actually increased their risk of incurring alcohol-related harm. Further, the myth that parental supply of alcohol, or supervision of alcohol consumption will teach adolescents how to drink responsibly is just that—a myth.

Recently, Mattick, et al, conducted a prospective study using data culled from the Australian Parental Supply of Alcohol Longitudinal Study of adolescents to examine correlations between parental supply of alcohol and subsequent drinking outcomes over the 6-year period of adolescence. Children in grade seven and their parents were recruited and surveyed annually. In total, 1927 eligible parents and adolescents were recruited by June of 2011 and were followed until 2016.

The researchers found that the odds of subsequent binge consumption, alcohol-related harm and symptoms of alcohol-use disorder were increased for adolescents who were supplied alcohol only by parents (odds ratios, 2.58, 2.53, and 2.51, respectively) when compared with parents who did not supply alcohol to their children.

In this prospective study, associations between both parental supply of alcohol and supply from other sources, and after adjusting for known covariates, revealed pattern of harm associated with parental supply. By the sixth follow-up (mean age 17·8 years), parental supply of alcohol was found to be associated with binge drinking, alcohol-related harm, and symptoms of alcohol use disorder. The findings also revealed that parental supply not only increases adverse outcomes itself, it also risks increasing obtaining alcohol from other non-parental sources.

Plainly stated, there is no evidence to support the view that parents who supply alcohol to their teens protect them from adverse drinking outcomes. The authors write. “Parents should be advised that this practice is associated with risk, both directly and indirectly through increased access to alcohol from other sources.”

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Published: 28 April 2018

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Drinking is ingrained in our social life – much as cigarettes were until public health campaigns led to a huge cultural shift. With many young people eschewing alcohol, the beginning of the end of booze Britain is in sight

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/23/time-please-is-drinking-becoming-as-socially-unacceptable-as-smoking Hannah Jane Parkinson

Mon 23 Apr 2018 17.00 

 More than a quarter of 16- to 24-year-olds are teetotal, according to a 2017 study. 

A cool glass of sauvignon canalside in the summer. A soothing beer by a pub fire as the leaves turn red. Mulled wine with a Christmas mince pie. Alcohol is shot through British life like, well, shots on a night out. But recent trends suggest that might be changing. Could the British love of booze be drying up as surely as our passion for cigarettes?

Consider this: in 1974, half of British adults smoked; by 2017, that figure had fallen to just 16%, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The decline was a result both of public health campaigns and legislation encouraging people to cut back or stop smoking. In 2003, for instance, the branding of cigarettes as “light” was banned in the UK. That same year, EU legislation brought in health warnings on products, and in March 2006 Scotland became the first country in the UK to introduce a smoke-free law. This was followed in 2007 by legislation banning smoking in workplaces and enclosed public spaces in England (Wales and Northern Ireland also legislated against smoking that year).

The result was immediate: fag breaks at work were suddenly more frowned upon; the huddle of people outside the pub failing to light a cigarette in the driving rain came to seem pitiful. All the incremental changes – the health warnings, legislation, the images of diseased lungs on fag packets, the association with impotence – led to a genuine cultural shift. If you wanted to keep smoking, you had to be really committed (addicted, maybe?). Social and fairweather smokers dropped away.

Could the same trend be under way with our attitude to alcohol? Some experts believe so. It will be a huge shift, because drinking in the UK has a spirited history, stretching back thousands of years – jugs for fermenting alcohol go back to the stone age, past Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane in the 1700s through to the peak modern drinking period of the 90s and early 00s. This was the Britpop era: a wasted Jarvis Cocker mooning at Michael Jackson at the Brit awards in 1996 and the hideous proliferation of garish alcopops with brand names with no vowels. That period also saw a breakdown in the social taboos around women’s drinking that led to an explosion of alcohol being marketed to them. Witness the birth of the ladette and girlfriends drinking boyfriends under the table. Witness a massive overall rise in consumption.

As a society, we have always thought of drinking as a bit naughty. The language we use is telling. A “cheeky pint” after work; a “swift half”; “OK, but just one glass of merlot”. Everyone has feigned resistance at one time or another – but we don’t try very hard. And in recent decades, anyone who didn’t want to drink was considered an anomaly. You driving? You sick? You on antibiotics? You pregnant? You, you know … (whisper it) in recovery? An answer of none of the above would elicit raised eyebrows, a puzzled expression or, more likely, mirth. Possibly even anger or dislike. In years past, people who have chosen sobriety, or rarely had a drink, have been subject to intense peer pressure. Non-drinkers became isolated – not out of preference, but because British social life has been entirely organised around alcohol. Booze sat at the head of the table at dinner parties, dominated the dancefloor and landed deals at lunch meetings.

But over the past decade, that culture has shifted. It has certainly been difficult to avoid the news that alcohol isn’t good for you. The most recent reminder came last week, care of a Lancet paper, reporting that every glass of wine or pint of beer over the daily recommended limit will cut half an hour from the expected lifespan of a 40-year-old. And that recommended upper safe limit is lower than you might expect. The paper suggested five 175ml glasses of wine or five pints a week – about 12.5 units in total. Overdo it, and you are at greater risk of stroke, fatal aneurysm, heart failure and early death.

Then there’s the cancer risk. There was consternation in 2016 when Prof Dame Sally Davies, the government’s chief medical officer, told MPs just one glass of wine could increase the risk of breast cancer. This came just a few weeks after the recommended upper safe limit for men was revised down from 21 to 14 units a week, the same as for women.

The quality newspapers interview health experts and sociologists about the problems with alcohol; the popular press shames indulgent punters (usually northern, often women) on dark high streets, hitting the chip shops at 3am. That picture of the woman lying on her back on a bench, sozzled, gets wheeled out. And there have been all sorts of schemes and campaigns designed to curb our enthusiasm for drinking. There’s the Department of Transport’s road-safety Think! campaign, for instance, much of which has focused on drink driving. In 2012, Andrew Lansley and the Department for Health rolled out the Change4Life campaign, while Challenge 25, introduced in 2005 by the British Beer and Pub Association, encourages people who may look under 25 to carry ID when attempting to purchase alcohol, and encourages retailers to ask for it. This has made it harder for groups of teenagers to bulk buy supermarket-own tinnies. (Attempting to enter licensed premises to buy alcohol using a fake ID is a criminal offence, carrying a maximum £5,000 fine and up to 10 years imprisonment.)

All of this legislation, campaigning and awareness raising has had an impact, just as they did on tobacco consumption. In particular, millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and the later Generation Z (those born after 1996), are surprisingly sober.

“Alcohol is a strange concept,” says Ben Gartside, 19, a politics student at Hull University who is originally from Manchester. “Here’s a liquid you can drink and it can lead to you not remembering the night before and making bad decisions.” Ben is typical of many young people I speak to, in that he prefers to spend his money on food and travel rather than pub sessions.

Another young person I speak to says his family are heavy drinkers and he wanted to avoid falling into that pattern. In a broader sense, says Dr James Nicholls, director of research and policy development at Alcohol Research UK, this is quite common among young people; they are rebelling against older generations’ chosen methods of rebellion. According to a 2017 ONS study, more than a quarter of 16- to 24-year-olds are teetotal, a four-fold increase on the rest of the population, with just one in 10 seeing drinking as “cool”. Nicholls says that drinking among young people has been declining for a decade.

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Published: 22 March 2018

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FARE 2018 Annual alcohol poll: Attitudes and behaviours.

The Poll is now in its ninth year of publication and explores Australia’s attitudes towards alcohol, drinking behaviours, awareness and experience of alcohol harm, and opinions on alcohol policies.
 
Key findings this year include:

• Fewer than half than half of Australians are aware of the link between alcohol misuse and stroke (38%), mouth and throat cancer (26%) and breast cancer (16%).
• 70% of Australians indicate that they are aware of the Australian Guidelines to Reduce Health Risks from Drinking Alcohol, but only 28% are also aware of the content.
• 84% of people think Australians have the right to know about the long-term harms associated with regular alcohol use.
• 80% of Australians think governments have a responsibility to educate Australians about long‑term harms associated with regular alcohol use.
• 61% of Australians believe that the alcohol industry would downplay independent university research findings linking alcohol consumption to a range of harms such as cancer and family violence.

The report, along with a series of short videos, is available at www.fare.org.au