So…day-drinking is fine, then?
always as been. how else would we survive work.
I was in Scotland once and somebody told me shops (not bars!) can only sell alcohol between 10am and 10pm and i believe they told me it was in general a very good thing. I believe Scotland has (or had?) a relatively high amount of alcoholic homeless and this i believe was to keep them more healthy. I can imagine Poland has similar problems and this sounds like a similar solution.
Scotland has indeed had a lot of problems with drinking too much. Still does, but there have been major improvements. When the laws that brought in the 10am - 10pm limit were introduced in 2005, Scotland was seeing roughly 2.5 times as many alcohol-specific deaths per capita as the UK as a whole and almost twice as many as Northern Ireland, the second-worst for it. And that’s the UK, a country with a notoriously unhealthy drinking culture in the first place. Scotland remains clearly the worst in the UK, but the gap has narrowed to more like 150-200% instead of 250%. A few things to note:
- The 2005 law brought in many changes on the recommendation of a 2003 report, so effects can’t be isolated to the limited hours alone. Promotional deals on alcohol were severely restricted, as an example
- Further changes have been made since to introduce things like a minimum price per unit of pure alcohol
- Scotland’s alcohol problem hits the poorest hardest, but is certainly not exclusive to the poorest or to the homeless. The laws were not specifically aiming to reduce alcohol consumption among the homeless in particular
As I understand it, the reasoning was basically to minimise how often people would be buying more alcohol while already drunk. I think that this is probably a sensible move. I definitely enjoy alcohol, and I can recognise that it’s much easier to make poor decisions about how much to drink when you’ve already had a few
It’s definitely not a magic bullet, of course. Nothing ever will be. But yeah, I do think it can help
Separately, it is so engrained in me that I feel deeply uncomfortable buying drinks in a supermarket late at night in other parts of the UK
How am I supposed to sober up without my hair of the dog hangover elixir?
