South Africa: Don’t touch a drop 滴酒不沾

LOWERING the permissible alcohol level for drivers is common enough. Banning booze on the roads altogether is plainly far more drastic. But road deaths in Brazil, for instance, have dropped by almost a third in the three years since the government told drivers to eschew even a drop. The South African government, in a bid to cut the country’s tippling, proposes to follow suit. It wants to ban all alcohol advertising. Some ministries have stopped serving booze at functions. What about banning roadside pedestrians from drinking too? Even that may be under consideration, though it is unclear how walkers weaving home from a legal drinking bout would be taken to task.

In alcohol-consumption league tables, South Africa is middle-of-the-road; between half and two-thirds of its citizens never drink. But if teetotalers are excluded, South Africans may be the fifth-heaviest tipplers in the world, with each adult drinker downing on average 35 liters of pure alcohol a year, twice as much as in France or the United States, says the World Health Organization.

Many South Africans are binge drinkers. The country’s Central Drug Authority estimates that over a third drink from early Friday afternoon, when most get paid, right through to Monday morning, when one in ten drivers are estimated to be over the drink-driving limit. Cheap home-brewed beer is their favourite.

Alcohol certainly boosts South Africa’s murder rate, one of the highest in the world. Three-quarters of knife murders, half of “blunt-instrument murders” and 40% of gun murders are reckoned to be committed under the influence. And alcohol is blamed for around half of the 14, 000 road deaths a year. More than a third of those killed are pedestrians, most of them also drunk. And alcohol helps raise the country’s towering rape, and still devastating HIV-infection, rates; drunks tend to forget about condoms.

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