CAN NON-SMOKERS TEACH DRINKERS?
If you don’t start smoking, you won’t form a habit and become a smoker.
New figures out today from the Cancer Council of Victoria suggest persistent and aggressive anti-smoking strategies have paid off, with the number of Victorians who smoke dropping to a record low: one in seven adults lit up regularly last year, compared to about one in five in 1998.
Most encouraging, 18-to-29-year-olds are no no longer the age group with the highest proportion of regular smokers, suggesting they aren’t taking up the habit at all.
It begs the question – if campaigns like “Kiss a non-smoker and enjoy the difference” have proven successful, is it time for the “Kiss… or no, hold on, “Shag a sober person and enjoy the difference” campaign? Because if you ask most teenagers, “picking up” is one of the key motivations to going out on a Friday and Saturday night, especially to places like Kings Cross.
But as we have seen, Australia’s rampant drinking culture is leading to violent and anti-social behaviour, sometimes with catastrophic consequences such as the death of Thomas Kelly after a violent assault at the Cross.
Imagine if being conscious actually became sexy.
The young lads at The Conscious Club and Hello Sunday Morning are trying to change young people’s relationship with alcohol one Sunday morning at a time. They have become the go-to place for thousands of young people (and growing every day) who want an alternative to getting wasted every weekend without being a religious group or cult! They just celebrate consciousness.
So, what do you think? Does the path of being ‘conscious’ have any potential to help curb the teenage drunkenness that leads to violence or are we kidding ourselves?
3 Responses to this article
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Dirty Pierre July 18, 2012
Oh great … if I want ignorant moralising I’ll go to the Catholic Church, thanks very much…. this is just bourgeois nonsense… naive and predictable …. Au revoir…
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amd August 3, 2012
The huge difference of course is that if I am sitting on the other side of a room from you and you are smoking, I get to smell disgusting like you do and the toxins go into my body too. Whereas, as tanked as you are in the other part of the room, my liver, heart, brain is not affected by your drinking and I don’t smell like a brewery just because you do.
Unless you have been binging or are an alcoholic, you also smell just fine a few hours later, after a shower or brushing your teeth. A smoker stinks, all the time. Showers, deodorants, tooth paste etc cannot mask the stench, it literally comes out of the pores and it can take weeks for a person who has stopped smoking to get rid of the foul stench.
Also, I have never met a smoker who does not smoke every single day, many times a day. A normal pattern of smoking if extrapolated to drinking makes someone an alcoholic. A person who has a 1 or 2 units of alcohol a night cannot be equated to a normal smoker (and just btw, I drink maybe once a month).
Excessive drinking causes problems – but that is not the norm for drinking. Again, people who are addicted to alcohol are called alcoholics. Whereas people who are nicotine addicts are called smokers.
Smoking is anti-social and selfish, and that’s why there has been such a drive to get rid of it. Nothing much to do with it being bad for you. Personally, I don’t care if you jam the nicotine up your bottom. So long as I don’t have to breathe it in or smell like you do, good luck to you.
