I agree that this kind of public awareness reporting is extremely valuable, I'm sure most of my friends aren't aware of what Canada's low risk drinking guidelines are.

I was involved in an interesting on-line course put on through my psych hospital "Fundamentals of Addiction" most of the people taking the course were mental health care professionals or social service workers who wanted to learn more about addiction.

One of the things we had to do was take CAMH's on-line drinking survey. It asks you questions about your drinking and shows you graphically how your drinking compares to other people in your demographic group, how much you're spending annually on booze, and how likely you are to experience harm as a result of drinking.

Well I know I'm an alcoholic so I answered the questions based on my drinking patterns before I first attempted to get sober in 06 and I was stunned at the results. It was one of those, I knew it was bad, I didn't think it was THAT bad reactions.

Anyway multiple other people in the course, who presumably didn't have a drinking problem said that they were surprised by their results, either by how much they were spending, how they drank in comparison to others, or their likelihood of harm. Several people said that they planned to change their drinking pattern in response to having done the questionnaire.

So I think anything that raises awareness is great.

--splitimage