Thursday, July 14, 2016

Alcohol: I Would for an Investigation

    Certainly alcohol, with the many damages it does to our society, deserves a task force to study those impacts.
   A first step to solving a problem, can be to quantify it. While we know much about the damage to society caused by alcohol, there is much we do not know. We have had a study informing us that one in six unemployed is addicted to drugs or alcohol, but do we know how many turn to drugs and alcohol as a reaction to being unemployed as opposed to how many are sent to their unemployment because of alcohol?
   We should learn how many are disabled by alcohol. Is it the leading disabler? We should look deeper into how many deaths are contributed to by alcohol. We should identify all the ways alcohol brings about death, and quantify how many die in each category. We undoubtedly have much of that information already in hand, but should fill it in with what we don't have.
   We should study the social impacts, from break ups in families, to loss of friendships. We should study how many people alcohol sends to the gutter, how many people are homeless because of it.
   Crime? That 40 percent of our violent crimes intersect with alcohol use should, alone, shock us so much that we would investigate. Can we identify how many of our violent crimes are actually being brought about because of alcohol? Is there the potential to reduce our violent crime rate by 40 percent?
   When an issue is important enough to Congress, it appoints a committee to study it. I would suggest, alcohol is more worthy of a study than is Hillary Clinton.
   A presidential commission? Perhaps. Whatever the nature of the commission -- whoever appoints it -- such a study is deserving. Alcohol is a major menace to our society. It deserves a major study. We should identify and quantify all the problems and search for answers to each. Finding answers would be of great worth, considering the damage alcohol does.

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