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Page 22: Addictions: Drinking.

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Alcohol

The consumption of alcohol has the biggest impact of any drug in this country but its use is socially accepted and it is not illegal, if you're over eighteen. However, aside from the health concerns, alcohol is expensive and unnecessary. We don't need it for nutritional value. If we have a lot of debt, we can do without it. Money Surgery does not endorse drinking alcohol and ideally you should be teetotal to keep hold of as much money as you can. Lets do some mathematics again. Six cans a week @ £1.20/can plus say six pints down the pub @ £2.50/pint is about £90 per month.

If you would like help with alcohol addiction, please have a look at our Contacts page. Good Luck!

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TV Advertising Ban for Sexy Booze

(21:00 Tuesday 15th March 2005 news story)

Television advertisers are to be banned from portraying alcohol as an "aid to seduction", and from showing it alongside themes strongly appealing to under-18s. The BCAP has begun a consultation process leading up to a probable ban by October. Advertisements should also avoid insinuating that alcohol enhances attractiveness, according to Ofcom rules.

At Money Surgery, a site that needs no advertising to enhance its attractiveness, we believe that the world would be slightly better without a lot of the television adverts that we've seen. We accidentally caught some Saturday morning children's TV last weekend, in between operations, and we were appalled at the advertising served-up for the kids. Typical was one that had someone in a pink hippo costume eating some hippo-shaped junk food, saying it was "delicious" in the style of George from Rainbow. There's originality for you. These poor obese children haven't got a chance have they? Advertising junk food using dancing cuddly characters between programmes for children, using terms like "delicious" is wrong. Ban these ads, we say, on the fat kids' behalf. Let's force the supermarkets to promote fruit-n-veg instead. They make enough profit. Then we'll have a healthy population that are no burden on the NHS. Until they're 105 and needing full-time nursing care and multiple hip or heart by-pass operations. Maybe we can kill two hippos with one stone, and get the countryside alliance to focus on pink-hippo hunts instead of red-fox hunts. I feel we're really sorting the world out here tonight, Patients.

But then there's daytime TV, funded entirely by a never-ending stream of adverts for homeowner loans, or for credit for people with poor credit histories, or for over-fifty savings plans, or for compensation claims companies, etc, etc. You could end-up advert-punch-drunk if your remote control was out of action. No, we don't want to a loan to help buy "our ex's half of the home", and if we did, we'd use MoneySurgery, or Moneyfacts, or anyone else to find us one first, no offence. These advertisers aren't always the best value product. They're just in yer face, every ten minutes, like torture until your spirit's so crushed, you call their freephone number in brainwashed desperation. Ban these ads, too, we'll all be better off, even if it means the end of daytime TV. It was rubbish anyway. The highlight is "Countdown", need we say more?

Women too, find that they're targetted with clinical efficiency. Have you seen Cadbury-ation Street lately, girls? The ladies get a conveyor belt of bad but irresistable products, usually having something to do with chocolate, when the soaps are playing. Choc-flavoured Persil, coming soon. Football programmes are merely vehicles for beer, sales-rep cars, and all the things that are bad but irresistable for blokes, usually involving a scantilly-clad attractive woman. Its easy isn't it: If you want to sell your product to people aged between 18 and 80, use chocolate or women-in-underwear, or both.

What we call bad for our health is usually bad for our wealth. But aiming adverts at young and impressionable minds, or even old and vulnerable minds, is wrong. Simple as that. It goes beyond the effect on their finances, even if that is later in life. More controls are required on television advertising. But thank goodness for a functioning remote control, and the ad-free BBC.

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