Alcohol- the solution to all life’s problems or the cause?
“ Reality is an illusion created by lack of Alcohol” – N.F. Simpson. This is one of the most common myths about alcohol, which is common in our modern society. Australia is a land of adventurous and fun loving people, who spend quality time with family and friends and sometimes enjoy it with a few drinks. Well, the question is does it stop with a “few” drinks and is it only “sometimes”?
Statistics show that at least 55% of the Australian population drop by a pub or a bar on the weekend for drinks. Is it fine if it is just having a few drinks and relieving the stress of the week on a Friday night? The answer from most of us would be a yes, but what most of us don’t realize is that when these few drinks exceed the limit it can lead to unpredictable and unsafe mishaps that can change lives.

It was a cold july winter night, when I was returning home late from work that night. The pressure of finishing the last bits of my work to submit a completed project the next day had caught me up so much that I did not realize that it was almost past midnight. I started walking home as expecting a transperth bus to pull up to me would be a foolish thought. It was a twenty-minute walk along a straight road with two bend to the right. I started walking and came across “The Reload” pub on the corner of the road, which was full at this late hour and wondered to myself what are people doing out so late on a weekday. As I was taking a right to enter my street, I almost experienced a heart attack when a red ford mustang from the parking lot of the bar, swiftly drove past me, practically throwing me down to the road. For how many ever seconds that lasted, it indeed was the most terrifying moment of my life. After taking around seven minutes to recover back to myself I realised that I almost lost my life, if I hadn’t been walking on the other side of the footpath. But also the carelessness of the teenagers driving the car annoyed me to bits. When I reached home I immediately went to bed, for my big day at work the next day. When I woke up and began reading the newspaper, whilst having breakfast I saw a picture that gave me goose bumps. A red ford mustang crashed against a street post killing everyone in it.

Alcohol has a complex role in our society. It is viewed as an addiction, a great accompaniment while having fun and also as a cure. Research shows that alcohol has some potential health benefits. It is believed that low levels of alcohol consumption may slightly reduce the risk of some cardiovascular diseases. But this doesn’t mean that regular consumption of this intoxicating beverage is going to make your heart healthier. In many countries, including Australia, alcohol is responsible for considerable burden of death, disease and injury due to accidents. In fact, when researched the top most issues of Australia, Alcohol is the top most on the list, on the Australian Government’s official website. This indicates that our assumption that it is only consumed occasionally is incorrect. As the society around us has developed and become modern so also has our frequency in consuming alcohol increased.

Alcohol was only considered to be a pleasure that could be enjoyed only by the adults. But our modern society or rather the “Party Culture” has encouraged adolescents also to have a taste of this pleasure. This led to the introduction of the term Binge Drinking and more accidents among