The COVID-19 pandemic was a time of unknowns. It brought confusion, anxiety, fear, boredom, isolation and a lack of structure. Experts believe this perfect storm led to a widespread increase in problematic drinking and alcoholism.
I had the opposite experience. No stress from traffic and work, no want to drink.
“A lot of provinces and territories saw tremendous rollbacks in important safeguards and public policies, particularly around the physical availability of alcohol,” he said. People were able to get alcohol delivered directly to their home, or pick it up at a curb.
I forget exactly when alcohol delivery was first allowed, but I do know that a local brewery started their delivery service in 2016 – so no later than that. Just how long does this guy think the pandemic was around for?
I don’t think that was the case in Sask, but I’m not 100% when it became allowed.
While some places did have limited delivery in the US it was very rare.
One pizza joint near me offered 6 packs if you bought a certain amount of food.
The pandemic brought 1 click website delivery from virtually every liquor store in the area, 7 days a week, of every type of liquor…
Bit of a tangent, but I’d be very curious to see the affect of sales if alcohol had carcinogen warnings plastered all over it like cigarettes do.
I’m sure the older folks wouldn’t care much, but I tend to think it might sway the younger folks a bit.
I think a lot of people have no idea that alcohol is a major carcinogen.
I didn’t see any numbers in that article that supported the claim. It should be easy to look up alcohol consumption numbers shouldn’t it?
9.7 standard drink per, or a 2.1% increase, during the first year of the pandemic: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220215/dq220215a-eng.htm
Alcohol related death went up 18% (calendar year, so doesn’t exactly align), which seems a much more important metric to me: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/alcohol-deaths-pandemic-1.6712273
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Every social media platform featured pandemic drinking games, tips for cocktails to have with friends over Zoom and alcohol-centred creative content and trends.
Chevrier said she believes this promotion of drinking was meant to lighten people’s mental load and thinks content creators outside of the alcohol industry had good intentions.
Lauren MacDonald, an addiction counselor and mental health therapist in Regina, said the amount of calls she got shot up during the pandemic.
Dr. Tim Naimi, a physician and director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria, said even though time will show a fuller picture of the extent of the damage, it’s clear that overall alcohol consumption increased during the pandemic.
“A lot of provinces and territories saw tremendous rollbacks in important safeguards and public policies, particularly around the physical availability of alcohol,” he said.
In a statement to CBC, the province said it now allows alcohol to be sold for takeout and delivery as part of a food order from a restaurant on a permanent basis.
The original article contains 1,224 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
To no one’s suprise when the only things allowed open were billionaires little clubs (huge fucking grocery stores which seriously inflated their prices, imo illegally) and LCBO…
Yes.
Source: https://pxtl.ca/category/cocktails/
(I made 100 different cocktails in a year as my COVID lockdown hobby - yay, alcohol culture!)
Assuming one of each cocktail and no other drinks, that’s one drink every 3.65 days.
Definitely not problematic. Unless you think two drinks a week really affected your life negatively, but I’d be surprised if you thought that.
I mean tongue was firmly in-cheek on that comment, I’m not seriously saying my cocktail hobby was “problem drinking”.
Alcohol “culture”
