Stupid, stupid drinking laws
Lili Radloff isn't ready to have LSD Sundays yet, so give her booze FFS.
Can somebody please tell me how it is that I live in one of the best wine producing regions in the world and yet, whenever I want to buy a bottle of wine on a Sunday, I have to prove my worthiness to some dodgy quickshop clerk with a secret handshake and a code word just so that I can pay an extortionate amount of money for a bottle of plonk?
If you’re not very good at planning ahead – and I’m really, really not – every Sunday lunch, every late weekend braai or impromptu midweek party has to be celebrated with an R80 bottle of Graca.
Sorry for you, if you wanted, say, a beer or, heaven help you, a whisky or two.
Ja Mom, I know what you’re going to say… ek wou mos Kaap toe trek.
I guess I understand the naïve kind of reasoning behind it. Sure, there exists a connection between alcohol and crime. Just as there appears to exist a connection between strippers and cat, tik and lying, and ecstasy and kak music.
But dudes, how exactly does making it difficult to buy booze on a Sunday help the cause?
I can’t help feeling these antiquated alcohol prohibitions are still there only because politicians are too cowardly to change them. And then we have to listen to their stupid lip service about protecting the public. Really? Where were you then when I needed protection from a bottle of vodka on Saturday?
But thank God this craziness is not only happening in South Africa. I’m starting to think that policy makers across the world are all nuts. They’re so scared to get their hands dirty, that they put totally unreasonable laws in place that fly in the face of logic to protect their own hides.
You might have read about a report that was recently released by the UK government’s chief drugs adviser Professor Nutt*. The report listed widely used drugs from most to least harmful. Turns out alcohol and cigarettes are more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, cannabis and ecstasy.
Now anyone with a vague grasp of reality and slightly more common sense than, say, Rodney flippen Seal, will see the truth in Nutt’s findings and the immense value in such a report. It is a hard truth but people die in their HORDES every year from nicotine and alcohol abuse. And it’s not helped by the “drugs are bad, mkay” but smoke and drink your little heart out culture we have.
Nutt pointed out how stupid, and dangerous the “artificial separation of alcohol and tobacco from other, illegal drugs [is].”
To which Mr. Politician responded by saying he “cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy”
Heh? Shouldn’t policy be based on scientific advice, mebbe?
For fok’s sake, it’s not like Nutt started handing out Es at primary schools. The man simply pointed out that we’re kidding ourselves in thinking our legal drugs are any less dangerous than the type you buy from hippies and Nigerians.
What happened to Nutt? He got fired. Yes, bizarrely, when the chief drugs adviser gave advice on drugs, they fired his ass.
Guess the gap between science and politics really is unbridgeable.
But good advice or not, I’m not quite ready yet to make LSD Sundays and midweek Es part of my routine. So it would be really, really nice if I could buy a nice bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, which was (stupidly maybe) still legal the last time I checked, whenever the hell I wanted to.
*ironically, if hilariously, his real name
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