Eckart von Hirschhausen in an interview: He calls for “legal protection against alcohol”

Eckart von Hirschhausen in an interview: He calls for “legal protection against alcohol”

Eckart von Hirschhausen in an interview
He calls for “legal protection against alcohol”






Alcohol causes “personal suffering and economic damage,” explains Eckart von Hirschhausen in an interview on his new film.

Doctor, journalist and moderator Dr. Eckart von Hirschhausen (57) reveals in his new film “Hirschhausen and the Power of Alcohol” (January 27, 8:15 p.m., the first), which makes the number one popular drug with our body, our relationships and our society. Exciting details on the TV report, which led him to the Munich Oktoberfest, St. Pauli’s pubs or an addiction clinic in Mannheim, he reveals in advance with the Spot on News news agency.

In your new film “Hirschhausen and the power of alcohol” do you show that a “normal” alcohol consumption is already sick?

Eckart von Hirschhausen: For a long time you believed that a little red wine protects against heart attack. I also liked it – but unfortunately it is not that. Alcohol makes you sick from the first sip. The German Nutrition Society recently published new recommendations. And that’s why I set off because I don’t have the impression that it has already got around everywhere.

What are the risks?

von Hirschhausen: “The liver grows with its tasks” became a winged word. But alcohol is also a nerve poison. And what has already surprised me about the studies is the clarity with which the risk of cancer is named that has not played a role in public for a long time. A bottle of wine is as harmful as ten cigarettes for a woman’s risk of breast cancer. I think that should be so clearly on the label as with the cigarettes.

The risk during pregnancy is also underestimated to damage the child who becomes a child forever. As a doctor in pediatrics, I had to do with fetal alcohol syndrome. I therefore know the personal suffering as well as the economic damage of 17 billion euros annually.

Among other things, they shot at the Munich Oktoberfest and in Hamburg – St. Pauli. What was most impressive for you?

von Hirschhausen: I can reveal that much: Not everything you can see there. The word “beer corpse” gets a concrete meaning. What makes all my reports: I combine the view as a doctor, as a science journalist with a view of us as a society. I start without a fixed script and like to look behind the scenes with the spectators.

There were certainly many at the Oktoberfest, but we start directly in a rather unknown part of the Oktoberfest – in the emergency medical care. I asked the long-standing “Wiesendoc” duty to shock him. And he doesn’t have to think long and simply says: “No.”

But isn’t there a right to intoxication? To what extent does cultural traditions and social norms play a role?

von Hirschhausen: Alcohol is the only drug that you have to justify if you don’t want to consume it. There is a right to intoxication. And another right – that on physical integrity. Just as smoking other people passively damages, alcohol also damages many others. This starts before birth when babies are forced to drink passive in the mother’s abdomen and are therefore damaged for life. In our film we also talk to a man whom a drunk driver smashed the leg.

Just as we have succeeded in protecting non -smoking protection, there must now be a sensible legal framework for protection against alcohol.

Are there new therapeutic approaches to overcome alcohol addiction?

von Hirschhausen: The addiction memory in the brain does not matter whether your wine bottle costs two euros or 200 euros. But there are new medication. And very exciting studies with psychedelics, like low -dose LSD.

That sounds crazy to treat an addiction with another drug. But under therapeutic guidance, the hallucinogenic experience of being able to look at yourself from the outside can apparently help to do without the intoxication in everyday life. A therapeutic revolution.

How do you rate the role of the alcohol industry and its marketing strategies in connection with consumer patterns in young people?

von Hirschhausen: An example from the film: Who still remembers the discussion when these alcopops suddenly came into fashion 20 years ago. They were missed with so much sugar and tropical fruit aromas that you didn’t taste that 5 to 8 percent alcohol was in it, more than in beer. The target group was girls and young women. When the problems became so obvious that politics had to act, a special tax was introduced to make the sale more unattractive. However, the tax only applies to drinks up to 10 percent. What happened? Now the things all instead of 5 percent like 10 percent today.

You can’t imagine something like that. But it is the truth. More damage to less money. The alcohol lobby can advertise 200 times as much money as the Federal Center for Health Education. It is not so surprising that we have all the pictures in our collective memory, how allegedly giving around and beer access to large sailing ships and erotic parties on tropical islands.

How could the long -term social and health costs caused by alcohol consumption be reduced by political measures?

von Hirschhausen: counteracting with taxes, upstairs up, limited sales outlets, age control, clarification instead of advertising. So exactly what has been scientifically proven and what other countries have been doing successfully long ago.

How did this film change its own handling of alcohol?

von Hirschhausen: The many fates in this film really moved me, from the dreary figures in the pubs of St. Pauli, about the relatives who break up silent suffering to the addiction clinic in Mannheim, which makes more effective offers of help with new methods than before.

I have been drinking much less since this film, taking a break during the week and in January all the month. And if you want to try it out for yourself, you have eleven months to choose from, you don’t have to be at carnival or for the people of Bavaria the October.

Spotonnews

Source: Stern

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