By CASEY NEILL
DANDENONG’S Cornerstone Contact Centre is part of a push to raise the legal drinking age to 21.
The welfare service’s co-ordinator Don Cameron said it stood alongside groups, organisations and individuals as MLDA21 (Minimum Legal Drinking Age 21), looking at ways to prevent and reduce harms associated with alcohol use.
“Barely a week goes by that our staff are not harassed, abused or threatened by people affected by alcohol,” he said.
“Family breakdown and substance abuse has led to many people struggling in life.
“The drug that is most abused and not only tolerated but advertised and pushed with great vigour in our society is alcohol.
“Alcohol is also the substance that contributes most to the damage we have seen over the past 20-plus years we have been opened.”
Dandenong-based Dalgarno Institute, a coalition targeting the adverse impact of alcohol and drug use, hosted a national MLDA21 forum on the issue at Parliament House in Canberra on 18 June.
“The event achieved its key objectives of opening up the first community and political conversation on this key policy issue,” executive director Shane Varcoe said.
Mr Cameron said statistics showed younger drinkers often caused the most problems with road trauma, street crimes and hospital admissions.
“All places around the world where the legal drinking age is raised, these issues diminish,” he said.
“They don’t vanish altogether but there is a substantial improvement.
“At Cornerstone we hear the terrible stories associated with alcohol use/abuse and it’s very sad when a young person starts out their adult life indulging in alcohol and encounters the damage that brings.”
MLDA21 is arguing for the change due to rising rates of youth violent offending and alcohol-related harm, scientific evidence that in the early 20s the brain is still developing and vulnerable to damage from alcohol use, and national support for the move increasing to 50.2 per cent.
