Aussie drink-driving laws have similar penalties, but our BAC level is still at .05. This will be moved to .02 in the coming years. Be safe for you, your family and the person you may injure because, you thought you were ‘ok to drive!’
SHOULD YOU BE DRIVING? DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE....EVER!
Young People: Late adolescence/early adulthood is a time when diagnosable mental distress often starts, and young people experiment with substances. This is typically a transition period with a lot of change11.
Co-existence of alcohol misuse and mental distress can be as high as 53% among those attending youth-specific alcohol and other drug services54. It is estimated that eliminating alcohol misuse could mean rates of mental distress decrease by up to 15% among young New Zealanders14.
Alcohol affects brain function, and for young people, high levels of consumption occur at a time when the brain is still developing25. This means that adolescent brains are more vulnerable to the effects of alcohol, with impacts on decision-making abilities, personality, and regulation of feelings26,55. The evidence is growing in this space, illustrating that alcohol has impact on not only functioning but brain structure.
Review of surveys and data sets analysed between 2001-2018 revealed,
Average @ 60% decrease in numbers of teens underage drinking
Average @ 35% decrease in young adult drinking 18-29 y.o. demographic
Significant increase in teenagers not drinking at all by approximated 50%
Teens drinking at risky levels also reduced by about 50%
Why these shifts?
Some contributing factors are (none are silver bullets and all mostly small, not significant influencer)
Young people attitudes shift in concerns that alcohol causes most deaths and harms in their community and demographic (again consistent public health messaging taking effect)
Smaller generation gap issue. Changing family dynamics, warmer parenting with more quality and quantity time, which consequently facilitates greater supervision and expectation about teen activity and where abouts. Better modelling by parents around alcohol use, including frequency and intensity changes. (Icelandic model reflects much of this)
Shifting attitudes to alcohol and teen reactions against previous heavy drinking cohorts.
Increasing focus on health and fitness – young people want to focus on study and success and see drinking as taking away from ability to do that…Once into young adult hood, can ‘let hair down’ a bit more. Alcohol increasingly more associated with poor health and health outcomes both short and long term. Short term diminished capacity for study due being sick is increasingly seen as a liability. Again, growing community awareness of these realities e.g. cancer, mental health etc, may also drive this attitude.
Changing patterns in leisure – Online based activities may mean a significant reduction in the peer proximity contagion e.g. not congregating with friends in public or private spaces and engaging in boredom and peer pressure initiated drinking. Online
Policy changes – Policy didn’t seem to drive change, more reflect it, but the combination of both attitude and legislation brings weight to bear in culture shift, e.g secondary supply laws, alcohol pop tax etc. Cultural position of alcohol is shifting. Not so much the central amenity
Other – Shift to other substances? This research seems to think this is not so, as a other risky behaviours seem to follow the same trajectory – Authenticity in being and relating. Teens are communicating they find non-drinking peers more ‘real and supportive’ and easier to forge genuine intimacies with. Surveillance – the advent of ‘instant recording and sharing’ via social media technologies, this both adds to the volume and frequency of ‘live’ negative harms/consequences of alcohol use, but also vulnerabilities to exposure to ridicule, blackmail or sabotaging future opportunities.
Dalgarno Institute: Further Reflections
Culture shift on any level requires multiple factors and as we have argued continuously for decades, education and legislation work far more effectively to shift both societal attitudes and culture, than simply education alone.
Consistency in both messaging, practice and modelling in an all-of-society context is also vital for culture shift to occur. The avoidance of contradictions or confusion in messages and models, as well as in policies and practices is imperative if we are to avoid the undermining of protective and preventative measures for the emerging generation – our children. Any contradictions of messaging and modelling in the public square only creates the cognitive dissonance and inertia in proactive best proactive public health change that the broader society is mandated to bring to the young – The future generations that it is charged for providing the best opportunity to grow strong, healthy and productively in every area of development.
Though this review of literature did not specifically look at Minimum Drinking or purchasing ages, indications are that such changes may assist in delay of uptake even further.
This study found that 22% of the children in the sample had sipped alcohol. Beer was the most frequently sipped and the beverage originally belonged to the father.
The study concludes that, providing sips of alcohol to children is associated with them having more favorable expectations about alcohol use.
RELEASE DATE: 01/04/2021
The Association Between Child Alcohol Sipping and Alcohol Expectancies in the ABCD Study
Abstract – Background: Underage alcohol use is a serious societal concern, yet relatively little is known about child sipping of alcohol and its relation to beliefs about alcohol. The current study aimed to (1) examine the contexts in which the first sip of alcohol occurs (e.g., type of alcohol, who provided sip, sip offered or taken without permission); (2) examine the association between sipping and alcohol expectancies; and (3) explore how different contexts of sipping are related to alcohol expectancies. This study expected to find that children who had sipped alcohol would have increased positive expectancies and reduced negative expectancies compared to children who had never sipped alcohol.
Methods: Data were derived from the 2.0 release of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, a longitudinal study of children in the United States. The present study utilized data from 4,842 children ages 9–11; 52% were male, 60% were White, 19% were Hispanic/Latinx, and 9% were Black/African American.
Results: This study found that 22% of the sample had sipped alcohol. Children reported sipping beer most frequently, and the alcoholic beverage most often belonged to the child’s father. It was found that children who had sipped had higher positive alcohol expectancies than children who had not while accounting for variables related to alcohol expectancies. Child sipping was not significantly associated with negative expectancies and the context of the first sip of alcohol was not significantly associated with positive and negative expectancies.
Conclusions: Providing sips of alcohol to children is associated with them having more favorable expectations about alcohol use.
For decades, cardiologists, GPs, as well as reputable online sources alike have been advising in favour of consuming moderate quantities of alcohol to decrease risk of major cardiovascular conditions. Such views became over time an almost established belief that penetrated public perception, research, and practice equally deeply. Because alcohol is a long-term health exposure that cannot be studied in randomized controlled trials, much of what we know about the cardiovascular health effects of alcohol comes from observational cohort studies. Such studies, also called ‘prospective epidemiological studies’, typically follow up thousands of participants over several years, then compare groups with different drinking patterns in terms of their risk to get a disease or die prematurely.
Findings from such studies and analogous meta-analyses have consistently shown that groups who drink moderately, usually defined as no more than two to three drinks per day on average, have 20-40% lower risk of dying of major cardiovascular causes than never drinkers or non-current drinkers. The large majority of the evidence used to develop the UK (and other national) guidelines on alcohol drinking comes from observational cohort studies.
Alcohol research methods: more than a footnote!
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to how these observational studies were done and who their participants were in relation to the alleged cardioprotective findings. Early alcohol studies compared moderate drinkers with ‘not current drinkers’ comprising people who never drunk alcohol and people who used to drink but gave up alcohol, a group which also included people giving up due to already compromised health (eg diagnosis of chronic conditions) and alcohol addiction. Such a comparison made moderate drinkers artificially look better in terms of disease and death risk because participants who were healthy enough at baseline were more likely to drink moderately than those who quit due to health reasons. One of the first studies to dispel this ‘moderate drinking health benefits’ myth found that once never drinkers and ex-drinkers were studied separately there was very little evidence for lower mortality risk among moderate drinkers. Poor study quality also seems to lead to more favourable results for moderate drinking. For example, a meta-analysis of studies on alcohol consumption and coronary heart disease mortality reported that once baseline heart health was accounted for and poor quality studies were excluded, the 20% lower CHD risk observed among low-volume drinkers in the whole sample was attenuated or eliminated. Last but not least, there has been hardly any discussion about the influence of study representativeness on the associations between alcohol drinking and cardiovascular health. In other words, does it matter if the participants in observational studies of alcohol and cardiovascular health outcomes are representative of the population as a whole?
Our post-stratification study
In our study we sought to roughly replicate the methods of other analogous UK Biobank analyses on the associations of alcohol and mortality, with one exception: our study statistically corrected the characteristics of the UK Biobank sample to make it comparable to the actual population in terms of age, sex, education level, smoking rates, and physical activity levels. We did this by using a nationally representative reference dataset from England (where 85% of the UK population live) collected at around the same time as the UK Biobank (2008). Post-stratification not only corrected the demographic and lifestyle characteristic but also helped converge the low mortality rates in the UK Biobank to be closer to the true UK mortality rates.
What do representative cohort studies on alcohol show?
Previous findings of ours suggest the ‘cardioprotective effects’ of alcohol are questionable when studies are representative and have high response rates. For example, our 2016 individual participant data pooled analysis of 10 nationally representative UK population cohorts with a high response rate (>60-70%), found that, compared with never drinkers, drinking within guidelines was not associated with beneficial associations with CVD mortality (HR: 1.03 (95%CI: 0.87 to 1.21). This is in stark contrast to our 2020 study in the unrepresentative sample of 297,988 UK Biobank participants where drinking within guidelines was associated with a hefty 27% lower risk for CVD mortality (hazard ratio: 0.73; 95%CI: 0.56, 0.95).
What does it all mean?
Our research program’s findings summarised above suggest that the unrepresentativeness of alcohol cohorts may have added insult to the methodological injury that led in the first instance to false research conclusions and poor advice encouraging moderate alcohol consumption for health benefits.
While enjoying the occasional drink should not be vilified, discouraged, or prohibited, the advice offered by reputable public health and medical institutions would better serve communities by eliminating references to cardiovascular health benefits. Especially when such advice is narrow and reductionistic by highlighting benefits without acknowledging ‘collateral damages’, such the considerable increases in cancer risk that even moderate consumption is associated with.
* The hazard ratio for drinking under 5 times per week became 1.00 (95% CI: 0.59 to 1.69) and for drinking at least 5 times per week became 0.93 (95%CI: 0.54 to 1.61)
