OPINION

Current charter a no

Re: "Senate committee to monitor constitution rewrite", (BP, Sept 27).

The Senate will monitor our constitution re-writing closely. Abhisit Vejjajiva correctly noted the goal of our current charter was not to solve the people's problems but to keep the military junta in power.

Thus, we can conclude that the junta-appointed Senate will do all it can to keep its authority as kingmaker so that its candidate can become prime minister with just 1/6 of the popular vote, again making us a sham democracy.

May's election made history by showing that the majority of voters have turned their backs on a dictatorship. Our elected MPs must ensure that we have indeed turned the page and are now headed towards a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" (Abraham Lincoln). For a fuss-free revision, the best place to start would be the 1997 People's Constitution, definitely not the current one.

Re: "Drug-fuelled horrors" and "Reality check" (PostBag, Sept 27).

In responding to both letters, the claim that alcohol is the most socially harmful drug in popular recreational use is based on two pieces of research: 1) "Drug harms in the UK: a multi-criteria decision analysis" (Nutt et al, 2010, The Lancet) and 2) "The Australian drug harms ranking study" (Bonomo et al, 2019, Journal of Psychopharmacology).

The situation in Thailand could well be different.

But what is known suggests that Thailand is not in fact so different to the UK or Australia when it comes to drug harm in society.

We do, however, have some solid statistics on alcohol's harm.

According to "A New Year's resolution for life in 2023" by WHO, drunk driving causes 5,529 deaths annually, or roughly 28% of all traffic deaths in Thailand.

As a telling example, it was reported the Democrat Party's infamous Prinn Panitchpakdi was in the habit of plying his victims with alcohol to make them more readily available to his lust.

He typically did this over a meal at a classy restaurant with a few glasses of wine.

I am sure that Mr Prinn saw himself as a responsible social drinker.

If either Richard Bryant, writer of "Drug-fuelled horrors" letter, and Christian Reeve, author of the "Reality check" letter, have statistics that show any such annually repeated drug-fuelled horror for cannabis, ya ba, or any other drug in popular recreational use in Thailand, I would welcome them bringing it to the discussion.

PostBag is an excellent forum to question why the following topics are being banned. The first question is why are we not told about the epidemic of excess deaths that has been occurring across the developed world. Why has not a single major news source reported that two Nobel prize winners have joined more than 1,800 other scientists in signing a declaration stating emphatically, "there is no climate emergency"?

On a more popular news front, why have we not heard that the senile US president owns a dog which has bitten at least 11 people in the last year? Under normal circumstances the dog's owner would be in court and the dog euthanised?

And closer to home, why don't we know what is wrong with Thaksin such that he requires a huge private suite in a Police General Hospital? In the annals of medicine there is no record of there being such a thing as a politically induced coma.