Should more be done to combat underage drinking?

[AB Asks]

New figures show that the police seized 37,000 pints of beer and cider from underage children as part of a two week campaign earlier this year. The government has hailed the results of �760,000 campaign as a success. Is this a sign that the government is getting control of underage drinking, or should more be done to try and clamp down on it?

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2806225.h tml

[Octavius]

Well the Soaps/teen dramas should definitely stop showing characters constantly sitting in the pub, or hitting the bottle of vodka and drinking it neat at the first sign of a crap storyline.

Government initiatives of this ilk are more often a smokescreen to generally raise prices/taxes and increase treasury funds, not to tackle social issues.

Personally rather than collecting bottles of beer, I�d prefer to see the police stopping young lads stabbing each other and making our streets safer. If alcohol is the route of all this evil, then it is a step in the right direction I guess.

[RevFunk]

Nothin will happen because the govt love all the duty they get.

Alcohol is far too easy to obtain.

Years ago the only places that sold alcohol were pubs and off licences

[cj69]

Alcohol has always been easy to get and even 30 years ago when I was a teenager we sat in the local park drinking cider or beer. No shop ever asked for ID then. The difference now is that kids get totaly wasted where we just got a little squiffy. Probably because we were afraid of what our parents would say if they found out we had been drinking.

[keyplus90]

I think children learn every thing from the parents. If parents are speaking English then most probably kids will speak the same language. Just like that if parents are drinking but saying to the kids that hang on until you are 18 (I think that is the legal age). But first of all I believe there is no legal age for any thing which is harmful for you physically, socially, economically and psychologically. Then kids will most probably do what parents are doing.

So perhaps parents should stop before expecting children not to drink. Few might go against me that social drinking is ok but binge drinking should be stopped. But if you see majority of the binge drinkers did start once as a social drinking.

[Bellringer]

Like cj I was doing it over 50 years ago. Then we took the bottles back for the deposit (3d). Our boast then was that we could hold our drink. Now it seems to be the opposite. Who can get the drunkest without dying.