With much being made about youths drinking on the streets, binge drinking, trouble, health problems et al, It seems it’s the job of random think tanks and government advisor’s to come up with idea’s to fix our so called broken society.
The latest being the best yet;
1. Take flashy packaging (?) away from Cigarettes and stop selling packs of ten in order to stop young people buying them.
2. Prosecute parents of kids who are regularly found with alcohol.
Now the idea that any kid buys fags because of their ‘snazzy’ packaging is laughable. ‘Ohhh shiny packet of Benson & Hedges I must buy some’ isn’t something that goes through the mind of a young would be smoker. So restricting the sale of smaller packets of ciggies isn’t going to stop little Johnny buying fags, he’ll just club together with little Billy and buy a pack of 20?
The alcohol thing is daft too; criminalising parents because their brat has been sold some bottles of WKD by a dodgy off licence just doesn’t seem right. If you must, ban alcohol in some public places (like a lot of towns and cities do already), monitor and hit hard shops who are caught selling booze to under 18′s. Some organisations want to go further, by raising the price of booze in order to curb the availability of teenagers; something that really gets my goat.
In my mind the price of alcohol has shot almost beyond belief in the last couple of years anyway. I regularly pay £2.70-£2.90 for a pint of lager in my local boozers and £3.50 in the local nightclub! I don’t drink much at home as it is but should I decide to start then why shouldn’t I be able to buy a slab of beer from Tesco for as little as possible just of the off chance that some little shit might puke up in a bus stop?
Here here!
I am all in favour of raising the drinking age to 25. Problem is, this would be unfair to the decent 18-25 year olds who can actually have a drink without feeling the need to cave someones head in with a paving slab
How are they going to prosecute the parents when they are kids themselves?
While were at it lets make sex illegal too. Oh and being thick.
Oooh! A shiny fag packet! Byeeeee!!
Why not simply require all off licences to check proof of age for all their customers. I’m sure my 90-year-old Grandma would happily get her pension book out when she wants her monthly bottle of sherry.
PS, if the whole chain lost their licence for a major breach, then the supermarkets and chain offies would all self-regulate. Ask Tesco how much money they’d lose if they had a three-month ban on selling alcohol.
Oh don’t start me on the demonizing and legislating of young people in the UK, as someone who works with young people in London and beyond the ability of law makers and politicians to not only misjudge and over state the situation beggers belief.
That picture is ace, it should be used for advertising
Make getting drunk less fun for kids. Put something in turkey twizzlers that gives you the worlds worst hangovers even at the age 15 (I never used to get hangovers until i was 21ish) that would stop them!
As for smoking, i think they could try and maybe just remove the word from the dictionary, hide the packets from the shelves, and make people who smoke (like me) do it in secret, people would soon forget what they were.
When i say secret i mean as stealthy as you were when your mum didn’t know you smoked.
maybe, just maybe, many of these kids get thier cigarettes on the black market?
maybe, just maybe they get their alcohol at home or steal it?
the idea of ‘dodgy small shops’ is a typical scapegoat – as a shop keeper we can be entrapped by the police and lose our livelihoods for selling alcohol and cigarettes to kids.
i dont understand why you have an issue with prosecuting parents of kids who are regularly found with alcohol – their children are their responsibility!