Posted on 03/28/2019 5:54:18 AM PDT by rickmichaels
When Athéna Gervais, a well-liked, active 14-year-old with no history of heavy drinking, popped into the dépanneur near her Laval high school during lunch last year in late February, she had a choice of at least seven different varieties of alcoholic beverages.
Wine, beer, wine spritzers and sugary alcoholic drinks lined the shelves. Athéna went right for the 568-mL can labelled “FCKD UP,” printed in bright pastel colours. Nearly the size of two beers, it had an alcohol content of 11.9 per cent. The French advertising for the brand said “Rend F–KUP,” which translates loosely to “It’ll get you f–ked up.”
Athéna was 5-foot-2 and weighed 110 pounds.
She snuck the can out of the store, chugged most of it and shared a bit with her friends, then got two more, and chugged them, too. The three cans contained the alcohol equivalent of drinking two bottles of wine. Gervais finished them in 23 minutes.
She was found three days later, face down in two feet of water in a stream running behind her school. It’s believed she was taking a shortcut through the woods to a Tim Hortons, became disoriented because her blood-alcohol level was more than two times the legal limit for drivers, and fell down a steep ravine into the brook.
“It is unlikely that a person in control of themselves and familiar with a certain path would have decided to take such an inaccessible route and not be able to get up out of that small amount of water,” coroner Martin Larocque wrote.
In his report issued Wednesday, Larocque listed her cause of death as drowning, “in the context of the excessive consumption of a sugary drink with a high alcohol content.”
Drinking that amount in a short time period, the taste of the alcohol masked by high levels of sugar, had a “devastating effect,” he said, contributing directly to her death. Larocque said the marketing of the product was linked to Gervais’s choice of drink that afternoon: its bright colours, large size and promise of inebriation, placed in a high-visibility display case and targeted to an age group ranging from 12 to 24.
“Every tactic is used to attract the consumer that is targeted,” Larocque said.
Larocque recommended the federal government ban the sale of high-sugar alcoholic drinks with names or images that downplay excessive consumption, drunkenness or alcohol addiction. He also called for stricter regulations around how these drinks are displayed in stores. And he said the government should limit the size of the drinks to a single serving.
“What must be taken from the death of Athéna Gervais is that it is imperative that steps be taken to prevent the inherent dangers of excessive alcohol consumption, for minors as well as young adults,” the coroner wrote.
It is a real and worrying public health problem, Larocque said, citing provincial statistics that showed that from Jan. 1 to Nov. 26, 2017, emergency medical staff treated 2,332 young people in Quebec for severe alcohol intoxication — the equivalent of seven patients per day.
Federal Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor said her department is studying the idea of changing packaging on sugary alcohol drinks “to ensure these products are not appealing to kids,” but there are no set plans at the moment. As to limiting the alcohol content in sugary drinks to the equivalent of one serving, Petitpas-Taylor said the government was moving ahead in the next two weeks with new regulations to lower limits to a maximum of one-and-a-half servings per container, as is seen in other mixed drinks sold, but would consider future changes.
The cans Gervais had been drinking had roughly four servings of alcohol each.
Shortly after Gervais’s death, the producer of the sugary alcohol drink withdrew the product from the market. The Quebec government lowered the alcohol limit for sweetened drinks sold in dépanneurs and grocery stores to no more than seven per cent.
Éduc’alcool, which promotes responsible alcohol use, said the coroner’s report responded to the agency’s recommendations under the control of the federal government, but failed to address those under the purview of the provincial government. Éduc’alcool is calling on Quebec to increase the minimum price of the drinks, order that alcoholic beverages that don’t taste like alcohol be sold only in provincial liquor stores, and put tighter controls on advertising.
Athéna’s father, Alain Gervais, was at the coroner’s press conference Wednesday to add his voice to the call for stricter controls and better education, trying to wrest some positive from his tragedy.
“She was just a kid, doing a silly adolescent thing, for fun. Until it wasn’t fun anymore.”
There should be a law or something./s
There is a lot of stuff wrong here, outside of a sugary, high-alcohol drink marketed to people aged twelve (twelve?) to twenty-four.
Parents who want to keep their kids alive need to educate them about the dangers they face.
And kids who want to stay alive need to listen to their parents and use their own noggins as well.
It's dangerous out there.
It always has been...and it always will be.
The upside is that our specie prunes itself.
Laws and regulations will never solve the problem of human stupidity and carelessness.
All that said, it's the danger of life that gives it a lot of its appeal. Who wants to live in a padded cell?
She stole it.
The more the Left tries to program children by banning things, the more they prevent them from critical thinking. That includes responsible decisions about alcohol, drugs, abortions, etc.
Not thoroughly enough.
Yes, it is, and the veneer of civilization is quite thin. When you look at the world realistically, we have locks on our houses and vehicles, alarm systems, video surveillance, police, and prisons.
There are multiple nations with nuclear arsenals, aimed at each other, ever more lethal weapons systems being developed (including biological weapons and robotic/autonomous weapons), and even the most impoverished nations find enough money to raise a military.
And, the cemeteries and official ledgers of the world are littered with those who died violently.
Why? Because the reality is that we are sentient beings capable of amazing good and amazing bad, and live in a real world in which we compete with each other for quality of life and resources, among other things.
So, yes, it is dangerous out there, and we need to understand that, and protect ourselves, while we at the same time try to grow spiritually and help humanity to progress and make the world better.
At least one Quincy episode.
Stupid is supposed to hurt.
L
Fools. Teens don’t need advertising to want to drink. It’s an attempt to blame anything except the person who decided to drink.
She stole it. The article tries to hide that fact. She did it to herself. Obviously banning booze to kids doesn’t work.
This is from a column I had a year ago:
Let’s talk about alcohol use and raising children to be responsible drinkers. I know that heroin addictions and deaths are getting a lot of press, but alcohol addiction claims the most lives here in the States.
Children of parents who are heavy and inappropriate uses of alcohol often become heavy and inappropriate user of alcohol themselves. Heavy daily use, frequent drunkenness, DUIs, and other alcohol fueled issues and dramas, like that punched out wallboard, all contribute to the most misuse of alcohol by the heavy drinker’s children as they trek into adulthood The work of these parents is to get sober and then recovered. Sobriety and recovery are two different things. Sober is just not drinking, but life is pretty much the same, angry, dramatic or disappeared. Recovery is about building a different life, not centered on alcohol, and thus becoming a person of integrity and improving social and family relationships.
The next group are parents who do not drink, ever. No alcohol in their house. These people either cannot drink themselves, do not care for it, have lousy memories of alcohol in the family, or have religious objections. This group of parents produce teens and adults that do not know how to drink. In college and young adulthood these young men and women are the second heaviest users of alcohol. Which exactly is NOT what these parents want for their children.
The third category of parents are the parents who use alcohol moderately and mostly in a celebratory way. (and I do not mean Yay! The sun came up! or Yay! The sun went down! kinds of celebrations, either!).
These moderate-use parents talk to their children and teens about alcohol use and misuse. They disparage drunkenness and point out that responsible alcohol use is a hallmark of maturity. They show their children how to drink, for there is nothing sadder than an alcohol-poisoned teen explaining that he thought that 3 to 5 water glasses of vodka were normal party doses.
Teaching moderate drinking is providing children with an occasional glass of wine cut with water or beer with dinner. Yes, I said children, for if you think that a cram course of appropriate alcohol use at age 17 just in time for the Prom is going to cut it, you are wrong. You want your information and attitudes in their little brains WAY before the culture and their friends make inroads. You will offer them the occasional drink at home, perhaps once a month or so. You will talk to them about appropriate amounts in a drink and about prudent drinking, which is not more that one or two appropriately-sized drinks in an evening. You will have champagne at celebrations. You will have non-alcoholic beverages available to those who cannot/will not drink and explain to the children and teens, that alcohol is not for everyone. Older children need to understand appropriate times for drinking and discuss what to do if one finds that alcohol controls them. Discussing in a matter-of-fact way that there are some people that just cannot drink, just like there are people who cannot walk tightropes because of balance issues, or become bee-keepers because of an allergy. Not all people can do all things. Those young people need to be taught their other options and how not to drink in social settings and find lives without alcohol.
Parents with alcohol problems or a family history of alcoholism have a responsibility to talk to their children and teens about that history and the genetic influences of alcoholism. Parents who cannot drink or serve their children alcohol have a responsibly to tell their young teens what normative drinking looks like. It is a life skill that they may never use, but they need to know… like changing a tire…I have never changed on…, bless you Triple A… but I know all the details.
So, parents who are heavy users and parents who do not use alcohol both have children at risk for heavy drinking as teens and adults as well as alcoholism. Moderate using parents who are modeling responsible use of alcohol have children with more control, and less chance of alcoholism in their futures.
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