Alcohol the worst drug

re: "Drink-drivers wreak havoc" (BP, December 31)

Dear editor,

Were it not so fatally sad, it would be merely boring to have to repeat well-known facts that Thailand's traditional New Year road carnage reminds us of. One obvious fact is that alcohol maintains its traditional position as the most harmful recreational drug of addiction in popular use, being involved in 40.90% of the accidents over the current festive season as it continues to kill and main the innocent, to tear families apart, and to incite rape, fights and other violence, all those traditional elements of an alcohol fuelled New Year. The Singha and other drug barons profiting so mightily from this carnage their drugs cause are doubtless crying all the way to the bank.

Meanwhile, resources that could otherwise be usefully spent reducing alcohol's massive harms to society are wasted on losing costly wars on less harmful recreational drugs, decades long failures that serve only to worsen the harms they cause society by handing official monopolies to mafia scum eagerly supported by corrupt officials. This is not a happy New Year or any other sort of happy, except of course to the corrupt and mafia, whose bank accounts are flourishing as happily as those of the legally blessed alcohol traffickers. Perhaps they will make the requisite showy donations from their profits to bribe the karmic officials keeping track of merit to ensure that the traditional status quo continues in their happy New Year. 

 Felix Qui

Correction 

Submitted as a comment on the PostBag page, January 1, 2019.
I should have written not "carnage their drugs cause," but "their carnage causing drug." It is, after all, their drug that brings in the money for the beer barons and other alcohol producers. It is society, families and individuals who pay the costs of the carnage caused. 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on January 1, 2019, under the title "Alcohol the worst drug" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1603602/alcohol-the-worst-drug