Dave Sanders for The New York Times: Late last year, the New York City health department unveiled the latest installment in a subway advertising campaign meant to illuminate the perils of heavy drinking. Featuring young people who would seem to have aggressively exceeded the city’s recommended limits for alcohol consumption — no more than one drink a day for women, no more than two for men — the posters depict the ugly consequences of a kind of night life that draws many 22-year-olds to the city in the first place.
The police have designated Corona, Queens, a high-impact zone, meaning that the streets have a heavy law-enforcement presence because of high crime.
In one of the newer ads, a young man, face bruised, his neck in a brace, is being hauled away in an ambulance. “Two drinks ago,” the copy reads, “this wasn’t your ride.” Two drinks ago, one infers, our subject wasn’t drinking a Rhône Valley white.
The campaign arrived amid discomfiting statistics that made it hard to dismiss as hysteria. In 2009, alcohol was responsible for more than 8,840 hospitalizations in New York, a 36 percent increase over 2000. Additionally, the proportion of alcohol-related emergency-room visits among New Yorkers ages 21 to 64 doubled from 2003 to 2009. There were 70,000 such visits just in 2009.
So the question arises: Ought we to do something? Or rather, should we think harder about drinking as a matter of urban policy?
Categories: Americas, Behaviour, Belief, Crisis, Culture and Traditions, Faith, Family values, Morality/moral values, Society, Socioeconomics, United States