Toronto residents will be allowed to consume alcohol in a select number of parks in the coming months after city council approved a time-limited pilot program. The pilot project will run from Aug. 2 t...
Laws won’t stop people drinking and causing a nuisance. They won’t drink more now because it’s legal.
But now I can go to the park and have a beer with some friends after work. Sadly I can’t afford to rent somewhere with a back yard, public parks other areas are an important part of the collective public health, and cracking a cold one at the same time, well, no complaints here.
Whether people decide to drink despite laws is not the issue, since you can’t force the stupid out of someone (but we can certainly at least try to enforce those laws). The real problem is the normalization of alcohol consumption in a public space, and I think it’s just plain wrong.
Parks are a family space. Keep alcohol in bars or at home.
The harm has been studied extensively, so if it really were about health and safety, council would have voted differently.
The study you linked does have a lot of great background, and drew very reasonable logic based deductions, but those deductions are not yet validated. They are certainly correct, but there is no data out of those deductions yet. To say X will increase alcohol harms is great and correct, but if you need to balance policies, you need some reasonable data to balance X vs Y. i.e. what are the public health risks of alcohol in parks balanced to at risk people forced into more dangerous areas or harassed by police?
As for the family space part. From my experience here in Montréal, drinking in parks doesn’t mean drinking everywhere in parks. Drinking (along with smoking, vaping, and cannabis usage) is not allowed in areas designed for children; and can be further restricted based on the intent use of a park or an area of a park. For example, with my two closest parks, one has a play structure, sand pit, and splash pad; there is no alcohol at all. The adjacent park has picnic tables and an artsy pergola; alcohol (and smoking and vaping) are allowed. This same division of parks (or sections of parks) is common.
While I understand your concern with alcohol in public spaces, I’m reasonably certain that there are shared private spaces, such as restaurants and sporting events, where alcohol consumption has not led to negative outcomes or concerns about the familyness of a space.
There may be a cultural difference in Montréal compared to Toronto that allows drinking in parks to not turn the city into a libertarian hellscape with pints in hand everywhere; but I don’t think so.
Well said. I’ll drink a beer in PJM while watching a softball game in the bleachers, or even in the north field in the grass, but it wouldn’t occur to me to go over to the playground and tip one back. Parks are shared spaces for everyone, not just families, and in a place where people gather to be with other people, there seems to be a natural division between the groups. It’s likely that those families will even have a couple of beers or a bottle of wine. I think the person you’re responding to thinks that it’s automatically going to devolve into a frat house hellscape with people doing keg stands. The reality is quite a bit different.
Laws won’t stop people drinking and causing a nuisance. They won’t drink more now because it’s legal.
But now I can go to the park and have a beer with some friends after work. Sadly I can’t afford to rent somewhere with a back yard, public parks other areas are an important part of the collective public health, and cracking a cold one at the same time, well, no complaints here.
Whether people decide to drink despite laws is not the issue, since you can’t force the stupid out of someone (but we can certainly at least try to enforce those laws). The real problem is the normalization of alcohol consumption in a public space, and I think it’s just plain wrong.
Parks are a family space. Keep alcohol in bars or at home.
The harm has been studied extensively, so if it really were about health and safety, council would have voted differently.
The study you linked does have a lot of great background, and drew very reasonable logic based deductions, but those deductions are not yet validated. They are certainly correct, but there is no data out of those deductions yet. To say X will increase alcohol harms is great and correct, but if you need to balance policies, you need some reasonable data to balance X vs Y. i.e. what are the public health risks of alcohol in parks balanced to at risk people forced into more dangerous areas or harassed by police?
As for the family space part. From my experience here in Montréal, drinking in parks doesn’t mean drinking everywhere in parks. Drinking (along with smoking, vaping, and cannabis usage) is not allowed in areas designed for children; and can be further restricted based on the intent use of a park or an area of a park. For example, with my two closest parks, one has a play structure, sand pit, and splash pad; there is no alcohol at all. The adjacent park has picnic tables and an artsy pergola; alcohol (and smoking and vaping) are allowed. This same division of parks (or sections of parks) is common.
While I understand your concern with alcohol in public spaces, I’m reasonably certain that there are shared private spaces, such as restaurants and sporting events, where alcohol consumption has not led to negative outcomes or concerns about the familyness of a space.
There may be a cultural difference in Montréal compared to Toronto that allows drinking in parks to not turn the city into a libertarian hellscape with pints in hand everywhere; but I don’t think so.
Well said. I’ll drink a beer in PJM while watching a softball game in the bleachers, or even in the north field in the grass, but it wouldn’t occur to me to go over to the playground and tip one back. Parks are shared spaces for everyone, not just families, and in a place where people gather to be with other people, there seems to be a natural division between the groups. It’s likely that those families will even have a couple of beers or a bottle of wine. I think the person you’re responding to thinks that it’s automatically going to devolve into a frat house hellscape with people doing keg stands. The reality is quite a bit different.