Ron's Review

P.S. The subsequent groups' reviews, could you all provide the URL instead? Please don't copy the whole article in here, talk about being neat and all. Thanks (No offense, Karen)

Here's the link to the article in question

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890275,00.html

Unhappy Hour: The fight against alcohol abuse is enough to drive two distant nations to drink

Point 1: The Tourism Minister claimed it would drive away foreign visitors and further damage a vital industry already reeling from global recession and the shutdown of Bangkok's two airports by anti-government protesters last year.

"It" in this case meant the proposal to ban the sales of alcohol during the Thai New Year. It is quite true that were the ban to be put in placed, the alcohol industry will be badly hit. However, the severity of the problem willbe dependent on some factors. When the article mentions "foreign visitors", it did not state how much of the sales of liquor comes from the tourists. The income from them maybe quite small compared to that from locals. This has been implied in the previous sentence "Yet excessive drinking is deeply rooted in the culture. "Thais are fun-loving people," said a recent editorial in the newspaper Thai Rath. "We all know that a party is not complete without drinks.""
One question that keeps coming up, how does the sales of alcohol be affected by "global recession and the shutdown of Bangkok's two airports by anti-government protesters last year"?

Point 2: In Britain, PM Gordon Brown rejected minimum pricing as unfair to the "responsible, sensible, majority of moderate drinkers."

Responsible, sensible, majority of moderate drinkers? This does not show that they will not be drink drivers. How are we to predict someone's actions when under the influence of alcohol? Then again, it is not an issue of fairness. The point of the increase in price is to discourage drinking in general in hope to reduce number of drink drivers, not to target drink drivers specifically. Also, is it really suitable to use fairness as a gauge for vices?

Point 3: More people are killed by drunk driving in Thailand in two weeks than in Britain in an entire year.

This is yet another case of misleading use of statistics. The author has not taken into account of number of cars, availability of alcohol and population density. Remember that one drink driver does not have to kill one person only. In certain areas of Thailand, the population density is very high, thus a single drink driver can cause multiple casualties.

Point 4: Curbing alcohol abuse among young people, for example, has as much (if not more) to do with parenting as with policing.

Easy for the government to displace responsibility onto the parents. Even though there might be parenting problems, the government still holds a significant amount of responsibility in educating the public. Say this statement is the cause of having a nanny government, but it still is true. If the parents can't teach their child, the government should be able to. Campaigns, lessons, fines or jail time, either one would have to work

Cheers, (pun not intended)