Should we follow John Singleton’s lead and cut out the drink?

IT ALL usually starts harmlessly enough. A few drinks after work — tonight maybe. Or at lunch, or over the weekend or at home before collapsing with exhaustion onto your lounge as the washing machine whirrs and a semblance of dinner is concocted. That’s just normal, everyday life kind of stuff.
For many of us, we know when to stop drinking. (That said, I bet many of us know lots of high-functioning alcoholics.)
Usually, we know when it is time to either go home, or get to bed and gear your brain into the next day of working, making the school run or taking care of one of hundreds of other life commitments we have.
But when you read that advertising guru, media mogul and self-confessed imbiber John Singleton has been warned by doctors he will die if he keeps binge-drinking alcohol, this should trigger a light bulb moment for everyone.
Drinking is part of our world. I like a drink just as much as the vast majority of the Aussie population does. But the key? Moderation.
Without getting all nanny-state, holier-than-thou, there is a stark difference between peeps who drink to live and those who live to drink.
The stark medical caution to the always amiable John Singleton, a man I like, came when his heart rate was monitored at an alarming 220 beats per minute — more than double a healthy rate for his age — forcing him to undergo a cardiac ablation procedure.

His son Jack said surgeons told his father if he continued to booze excessively he faced an early grave: “His doctors told him ‘Your days of having 20-schooner sessions are over. If you do that, you will die’,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
Yes, booze seems to be a constant in our culture and a big part of our national identity. But why does it have to be?
Why do so many of us continue doing something to such an extent that:
1. We ultimately can’t string a sentence together
2. We usually throw up
3. We feel shockingly hung-over, which affects having a normal life that day
4. We’ve just given our one and only liver a work over harder than a Wendell Sailor arm wrestle.
And even worse, we usually say and do things that, well, are often best left unsaid or not done?
Then, a day or two later some of us go back for more and more? I mean, what is it all about?
When I wrote about the brouhaha that surrounded the post cricket World Cup interviews conducted by Shane Warne it struck a chord with so many. Good and bad.
The impact drinking can have on family life — on our relationships, on our health, on our children is astonishing. Alcohol kills 15 Australians a day.
With underage and binge drinking having become a rite of passage for teenagers, the Federal Government should look at introducing measures to discourage mega-drinking like they did by raising taxes and selling plain packaged ciggies.
After this week’s manslaughter verdict after the one-punch that killed Daniel Christie — a punch thrown when McNeil admitted in a police statement that he was affected by alcohol — it’s not bloody good enough.
Perpetrators of major alcohol consumption are ugly. Embarrassing. They’re not empowering. It’s not something to boast or big-note about.
It kills. It can kill innocent bystanders and ultimately it can and will kill, in a very slow and uncomfortable way, heavy drinkers.

So why the hell does anyone want to kill — ahead of scheduled departure time — the one and only life and body we have?
But with all this drinking doom and gloom, there is some heartening news. Not all the stats are bad, with the most recent study released by National Health and Medical Research Council saying younger people are actually minimising their intake of alcohol.
It seems that fewer people aged 12 to 17 are drinking alcohol and the proportion abstaining from alcohol increased significantly between 2010 and 2013 (from 64 to 72 per cent). As well, younger people are continuing to delay when they start drinking.
In 2013, the age at which 14- to 24-year-olds first tried alcohol had increased since 1998 from 14.4 to 15.7 years.
Sure, it is and will be a slow burn but how good is it to see that the message is slowly seeping in, particularly to young peeps who have long lives ahead of them.
While drinking can be absolutely enjoyable (and many of us are in that camp) it can also be totally devastating. It is still a culture that can make for serious health and social problems.
If there is ever a take-home message from any danger-of-too-much booze stories it is simple.
So Australia, yes, we do have a problem and we need not just to talk about it, but need to deal with it.