Alcohol consumption

EVERY home, village and hamlet in Papua New Guinea has a member consuming alcohol.
Even in the remotest part of the country where beer is completely unheard of has a member of that tribe making his way to town and is indulging himself with beer.
From the humblest and most disciplined home, a member of the household has beer as his/her darling.
Almost three out of every five houses or families or persons is drinking and is experiencing the problems associated with alcohol or is inflicting the suffering on others either directly or indirectly.
A coalition of researchers in 2011, led by the PNG Law and Justice Secretariat, show that there is always a personal, social and economic harm a drinker’s behaviour has on families, children, hauslain, workplaces, strangers and communities.
This is social epidemiology at its best, looking beyond medical damage to the drinker, but to the harms in the drinker’s radius – some close, in the family, and some distant, co-workers and strangers – street violence, tribal fights, road crashes and crimes.
Most telling, most compelling, is the number of families broken and children displaced, one in three, in which the responsible adult was intoxicated.
You may have heard or witnessed a mother being battered by her drunken husband as she refuses his demand to have sex and he kicks the innocent life in the mother’s womb.
A father drives home in the early hours of the morning after a night out with friends hits the ditch on a wrong turn and a protruding object from the steering wheel slits his throat and he dies instantly leaving a young widow and two lovely teenage children to face life’s challenges on their own.
A young graduate with dreams and a promising career ahead is stabbed to death from a graduation party that went wrong.
A young girl coming back from school is attacked and gang-raped by some drunken youth from the same settlement and the old woman selling vegetables at her usual spot along the roadside market is crushed to death by a ragging truck plugging out of control whose driver drank beer all day.
There are many similar cases alcohol have caused in our Christian country- soon be elevated to a Rich Black Christian Nation as the talk in town.
Can PNG become an alcohol-free society where all problems related to alcohol and alcohol consumption, we see every day and experience in our lives, in our homes and community is totally non-existent?
What a Shangri-La – an imaginary paradise on earth or an exotic utopia – of alcohol anonymous it would be.
This may sound audaciously impossible as elusive as the mythical Shangri-La itself given the varying lifestyle and drinking habits we have to come to develop and embrace.
But if we address the root cause by isolating and removing alcohol completely from our communities, we can become a society minus the problems associated with alcohol.
Now it seems so common that the working class and the affluent end a gruesome week with celebration and is of course with beer.
Certainly many would agree how joyful it is to roll up the sleeve and enjoy few cold ones with the best of friends on the week’s end.
The marginalised on the other hand take alcohol as ‘opium’ to drown their worries or avoid looking down the barrel of the hard-cold facts of life.
While the rest drink out of peer pressure, inducement, or just couldn’t help the thirst and the finest simply drink up to alcohol’s famous adage, “beer helping
ugly people to have sex since 3000BC”.
Our birthdays, marriages and celebrations of any kind is punctuated with beer drinking at most.
Even our traditional ceremonies like moka, feasts, pig killings, harvests, funerals and compensations involve the consumption of liquor – a thing which just came into existence very recently with thanks to colonialism and globalisation.
Alcohol was never a part of our tradition since pre-colonialism or pre-Christianity.
Some anthropologists like to point to instances where people took kava or some form of intoxicating herbs and substances for medical purposes, rituals and special ceremonies in certain parts of the country.
That is nothing compared to the rampant and phenomenal usage of alcohol that has fast defined our way of life more profoundly than those places that invented beer or places where alcohol was there for a very long time.
Ancient Sumerians said to have invented beer. Sumerians lived in the Mesopotamian delta between the Tigris and Euphrates which is the cradle of civilisation are the ancestors of today’s Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians and the modern Arabic world.
But these countries for cultural, religious and socio-economic reasons banned alcohol outright and do not have the problems associated with alcohol.
The irony here is that the countries who have had strong heritage to alcohol have thrown out the unwanted beverage completely by prohibiting the sales, consumption, production and transportation of alcohol.
Whilst PNG who is just a newcomer to alcohol is having a field day and consequently has some of the world’s most worst cases of alcohol related upheaval continuing to go unabated to date.
The question now is can us not change this status quo in abating what alcohol is doing to our country?
Perhaps the government might want to sponsor interventions in addressing alcohol and its impact as a development agenda.

David Lepi
NCD