Passive Drinking

We are always being told about the effects of passive smoking and frequently we hear about the crimes committed by heroin addicts, the houses broken into so they can fund their habit and the drug related shootings . But what about the daily misery that many people suffer as a result of passive drinking?

The late Roy Castle highlighted the effects of passive smoking. He contracted lung cancer as a direct result of other people’s smoke. I am here to highlight the effects of a new phenomenon, one which causes more harm than passive smoking ever has done or ever will do and it’s passive drinking. The sad truth is that there is hardly a single person who hasn’t suffered or isn’t suffering right now from the very dangerous consequences of passive drinking. This is the harm caused to someone as a direct result of another’s drinking.

We often judge the person who drinks from morning till night on the harm they inflict on their family and others around them. There are support groups set up for the families who fall victim to passive drinking; the families who live with what society has labelled ‘an alcoholic .’ However, what we often fail to realise is the effect that all drinking has on other people. This includes the beatings, divorces, violence, neglect, the emotional as well as the physical hurt, sexual abuse, suicides, murders , stabbings, mood swings, outbursts, arguments,

unwanted pregnancies, financial ruin, not to mention the pain, anguish and misery all caused by the effects of passive drinking which are second to none.

I once treated a young man for alcohol addiction. He had also been sold the idea that he was an alcoholic and was desperate to stop drinking. One of his reasons for wanting to quit was that he had beaten up his own father while under the influence only a few weeks earlier. He could hardly recall the incident and clearly would never have done it had he not been drinking. The reason for this was that it just wasn’t him. He had been ‘under the influence’ of something that was controlling what he did and what he said. He was due to appear in court three days before Christmas. His father was not drinking but had suffered at the hands of somebody who had been – his own son. Not only had he suffered the physical harm but also the emotional hurt caused by his child because he was a victim of passive drinking.

A teenage boy woke up to find his best friend lying next to him in a pool of blood. He had stabbed him the night before but could not recall a thing. The boy was just eighteen at the time and had only been on a lads’ night out. He blacked out because of the alcohol and is now serving a life sentence for murder. Was the murder drug related or was it even murder? Did he know what he was doing? He was not in control of mind or body as he was under the influence. Is this a true story? Yes. Is this a one off accident? No. Incidents like this are happening every day all over the world.

How many other people are now suffering from the effects of passive drinking because of this one incident caused directly by alcohol? First there are the families of both victims. The dead teenage boy and the boy who killed him are also victims. Their families’ grief, sorrow and anger will be there every day until the day they die. The friends who have lost their companions and the people who lost their staff or colleagues also suffer. The paramedic who found the teenager’s dead body would have to live with that image for the rest of his life and the boy who committed the ‘murder’ will suffer every day for the rest of his life. He will wake up each morning having lost his best friend and knowing that he killed him. Then there is the cost to the state of keeping him in an overcrowded prison for a crime he can’t even remember committing. All this pain and suffering came about as a result of two boys wanting a fun night out. What possible harm could that do?

You may think that this is a very dramatic example and argue that in such situations there are many other factors, like the boy’s personality, for example. Some people believe that you have to be ‘that way inclined’ in the first place; that you cannot simply blame such behaviour on alcohol. Yes you can. If someone commits a crime while on crack cocaine or heroin, people immediately say it’s because of the drug and the perpetrators are offered help. However, if it’s alcohol they get a prison sentence.

When somebody on LSD jumps from a roof believing they can fly, do we assume that it is in their nature to

jump from roofs or is it more likely to have resulted from taking the drug? I have said and done many things that I would never normally do when ‘under the influence ’ and so has every single person who has ever drunk alcohol. That is the nature of the beast. When you say things you would never normally say or do things that you would never normally do as a result of alcohol, inevitably , somebody close will suffer the effects of passive drinking. It is difficult to know just how many people are affected by this phenomenon.

Sarah Collins suffered so much from passive drinking that she took her own life because of it. Sarah is the unfortunate mother who committed suicide three years after a wine drinking session ended with the death of her daughter. She never recovered from the guilt of her six-year-old daughter drinking the wine that killed her. Stacey (her daughter) had so much alcohol in her body that her blood alcohol level was more than twice the drink-drive limit. This may sound shocking; you may even find yourself judging Sarah for what she did, but I was given wine with a meal as a child. In France it’s seen as normal to give children a little taste of wine with dinner, albeit watered down. Sarah who was ‘under the influence’ at the time, was simply not aware that Stacey was going into the kitchen every five minutes to have some more wine, copying her mother, as children do.

The sad reality is that little Stacey would have suffered from the effects of alcohol long before she even took that first fatal drink. People are fooled into thinking that it’s only alcoholics who neglect their families and

cause heartache. However, the truth is that everybody who has ever drunk alcohol has caused other people either physical or emotional harm as a direct result of their drinking. Most of the time they will not even be aware of the distress they have caused but, in each case, the third party has fallen victim to passive drinking.

Children suffer all the time from the effects of passive drinking. They are frequently left to wait in the car with a Coke and straw while the adults go into the building for grown-ups only. They suffer the embarrassment of seeing their parents get overemotional, falling over or being sick. They see them getting loud, argumentative, aggressive or abusive to each other or towards them. They feel upset as they lie in bed at night, listening to alcohol fuelled rows or hearing the sound of physical abuse; memories that can affect their entire lives. There are the feelings of neglect and hurt when they cannot communicate properly with their drunken parents. They may desperately wish that they would return to normal so that they could talk to them and not to these ‘other people’ who they wish would go away. Children frequently suffer verbal abuse as a result of a parent’s hangover and wonder what they have done to cause it. They miss outings because their parents have been drinking or have run out of money because of the cost of taking their regular drug.

Children suffer all the time from the effects of passive drinking.

All children hate seeing their parents drinking, I know I did. There is nothing more embarrassing and upsetting to a child than their mother or father drunk. If you did manage to talk to your parents in their drug induced state, then you might either have them telling you how much they love you every two seconds or have them shouting abuse, blaming you for everything that has ever gone wrong in their lives. What’s wrong with the first scenario? What is wrong with somebody letting you know how much they love you? If you have been there you will know exactly what is wrong with it; they are not telling you they love you because it’s not really them. They are under the influence of a drug. This is not true affection, it’s the drink talking and it’s hurtful and embarrassing.

The majority of reported child abuse cases are directly related to alcohol. If a child has a parent on whom they depend and that parent is dependent on alcohol, then who can that child depend on? Obviously it’s not just the children who suffer from passive drinking; the whole family feels the physical, mental and financial burden of having an addict in the family. These are just examples of people who suffer inside the home; there are many other people who are affected by passive drinking . Fifty per cent of all adult pedestrians killed in road accidents are twice over the drink-drive limit. That’s not the driver, it’s the pedestrian. The driver who knocks them down has to suffer for the rest of his or her life, blaming himself and desperately wondering what could have been done to avoid the pedestrian. They spend a

lifetime suffering terrible guilt and regret even though they were not to blame. The accident and emergency staff suffer, not only through treating the patients who have been injured as a direct result of alcohol but also from the physical and mental abuse they receive from drunk patients who are the very people they are trying to help. Many hospitals now find it necessary to recruit extra security on Friday and Saturday nights. Ninety-eight per cent of physical abuse aimed at doctors and nurses is alcohol fuelled and the police also have to cope with an extra workload at weekends as a result of alcohol related incidents.

Then there are the victims of drunk drivers who suffer daily because of the effects of passive drinking. As well as the person injured or killed outright, families, friends and colleagues will be affected for the rest of their lives because of the tragedy. Then of course there are the other victims, the drivers themselves. The driver may wake up night after night in a cold sweat, reliving the moment over and over again and wishing every day that they could just turn back the clock.

Whole nations have suffered from passive drinking, including our own. England taught the world how to play football but was then banned from Europe for years because of the alcohol fuelled behaviour of its supporters. The 1998 World Cup in France erupted in violence by many different nations but mainly England and Germany. Every single person arrested had been drinking. Was this a coincidence? Of course not. Alcohol is an evil drug that removes people’s fear and causes

death and destruction. A whole nation is suffering the effects of passive drinking. It cost English footballer Paul Gascoigne his life’s dream, a chance to play in the final of a World Cup, as he didn’t get to play in any of the games because of his drinking. The rest of the team were also the victims – they were being deprived of one of the greatest football talents of all time. It cost football legend, George Best, his life even after he had a liver transplant.

If you are a non-smoker, you no longer have to suffer the effects of passive smoking at 30,000 feet as smoking is now banned on every major airline. However, even at 30,000 feet you can still be affected by passive drinking. It is now widely referred to as ‘air rage.’ British Airways have even had to incorporate a ‘yellow card’ policy for drunk and disruptive passengers after an air rage incident in 1998. Many passengers were in fear as a passenger went into a drunken rage. During one hour of mid-air mayhem he threatened to kill the pilot and headbutt a passenger, then he smashed a seat and indecently assaulted a stewardess. Staff and passengers had to wrestle him to a seat where he was handcuffed and strapped in by his ankles. Maybe they should have given him a drink to calm him down.

There are so many people who have been disfigured for life due to passive drinking. I was standing in a pub once when one man accidentally stepped on the foot of another customer. It’s easily done but the next time I saw that man, he was lying outside the pub with his right eye resting on the pavement next to him. The

other man had shoved a glass into his face for treading on his toe. The effects of passive smoking can take years to materialise but the effects of passive drinking are often instantaneous.

Every good night out on alcohol has a happy ending, doesn’t it? When you think about it, you can usually look back at most events where alcohol is involved and laugh about them, can’t you? After all, everybody knows that most nights on alcohol are just a …