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September 24
[17:30
GMT]
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The Dawn of Passive Drinking (or, reinventing an old message in expensive
post-modern packaging)
- An expensive question is being worked out for the collective good by expensive
people in the new Europe’s expensive meeting rooms: will the coming assault
on alcohol consumption be known by the moniker “passive drinking”, or not?
“Passive drinking” is good, because like “passive smoking”, it is a propaganda
slogan that attacks the individual as an enemy of society. But is it credible,
when it is so obviously a crock? Or, to put it another way, is the public really
as stupid as it would be convenient to believe? The experts are still debating
the question at public expense. Meanwhile, check out this article from Spiked,
which pins the tail on the collectivist donkey:
“Today’s public health outlook on drinking dovetails neatly
with other powerful contemporary trends that emphasise human vulnerability or
undermine trust between individuals. Linking drinking to free-floating risks,
independent of the intentions of individuals, is a characteristic of today’s
anti-humanist climate. But 200 years after his birth, we can take heart from the
works and legacy of Mill. He stood against the tide in his day and won. We owe
him a debt and we owe the future of freedom a duty to make our own stand against
the new public health alliance of the twenty-first century.”
June 15 -
Join together to chow down on yummy grants
– People who have long been involved in the fight against the antitobacco fraud
may remember Join Together –
a gang joined at the hip with heavy-duty pharmaceutical money
from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. JT was actively involved in antismoking
disinformation to youth. Then - to the relief of all - JT sort of faded
out of sight. But now the pharmaceutical group is back with the roar of
yet more Big Drug mega-grants.
They have the same old prohibitionist agenda aimed at young, innocent
targets – but with a diversification this time: anti-alcohol rhetoric
and disinformation. Their “remedies” are also the same old, same old: more
taxation, more restrictions, more repression, more control – and, of course
6-digit death tolls -- can’t forget those -- for emotional appeal. Their “solutions”
are, of course, as inevitable as they are predictable: (pharmaceutical)
therapies, therapies, therapies, therapies.
“Save lives, save lives!”
is the universal cry of all morbidly obese grant-eaters. In the
front page of the JT site there is a question: “How Much is Too Much?” This
is a question we should really ask ourselves as well – and then start doing something
about it.
June 15 -
Marketing booze to the kiddies -
A
huge percentage of the liquor industry's profits comes from sales to
minors and, in a hilarious example of comparing oranges to apples, sales
to those who abuse alcohol. Demonstrating the scientific precision
that defines junk science practitioners, the researchers' "estimate" of
these alcohol sales ranges from just over a third to nearly one half of
all alcohol sales. That's a pretty broad span, which should
immediately relegate this study to the recycling bin. Instead it
finds a niche in the Washington Post under the byline of a columnist
whose credulous repetition of special interest campaigning appears under
the headline of "Unconventional Wisdom."
The conclusions of this "sobering" study
are conventional in the extreme. Big Booze is growing obscenely
rich marketing its deadly product to those not yet old enough to buy it
and those whose lives have been ruined by drunken addiction. Of
more use to the readers would be, at the very least, the disclosure of
what organization funded this study. Considering its triple
assault on tobacco, obesity and alcohol, it is very likely that the
bucks needed to crank out this call for tighter regulation of the liquor
industry, as well as the implicit endorsement of litigation to recover
costs borne by society, came from the bursting portfolio of the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF, whose billions come from the
pharmaceutical industry, which has both the will and the means to attack the
industries from which it hopes to carve off a hefty slice of customers.
June 15 -
Doing the right thing -
For
13 years the North Beach section of San Francisco has hosted a jazz
festival held in historic Washington Square in the summer. This
year the city's Recreation and Park Commission, kowtowing to
anti-alcohol special interests, decreed that no alcohol could be sold on
city property during the event. Drying up the festival would cost
the organizers $40,000. Rather than follow the lame example set by
the tobacco industry the organizers simply pulled out and cancelled the
popular event. To their credit the organizers rejected the offer
of a tax-funded grant dangled by Park and Rec to induce the festival to
proceed with the event after its financial legs had been amputated.
News reports of the final hearing before
Park and Rec indicate that prior festival alcohol sales had not led to
the drunken bacchanalia anti-alcohol interests cited as justification to
install prohibition. Last year a total of four people were
arrested for public drunkenness. Facts, as always, were trumped by
ideology and the ideology of the day in San Francisco is prohibition; of
alcohol, of smoking, of fun.
May 1 -
Over the top in Texas: every bar patron a suspect
-
A heavy-handed and intrusive alcohol enforcement program in Texas
has just been suspended, to the relief of local bar owners and their customers.
The program had sought to identify drunks in bars and arrest them after a
breathalizer test, and bar patrons were being tagged and pulled out of the
premises for testing sometimes after just a couple of drinks.
“If they don't want people drinking, they should outlaw alcohol," said one
owner. That, of course, would at least have the virtue of being an honest
approach. But as every politician and lifestyle purity activist knows, harassing
‘em on one hand and taxing ‘em on the other is more fun and more lucrative.
And when in doubt, harass ‘em just in case.
May 1 -
Presumed guilty
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New
York legislators are considering whether to require auto makers install a
breathalyzer in all cars and trucks. The device supposedly makes it
impossible for an intoxicated driver from starting the vehicle. Needless
to say Mothers Against Drunk Driving is endorsing this latest intrusion into
privacy.
"If the public wants it
and the data support it, it is literally possible that the epidemic of drunk
driving could be solved where cars simply could not be operated by drunk
drivers," says Chuck Hurley, CEO of MADD, which is hosting its first
conference on drunken-driving technology in June. "What a great day
that would be."
The public, in the shape of
biased surveys, will duly "support" the onboard breathalyzer and even if polling
can't be slanted enough, special interests, such as MADD, whose primary purpose
is self-perpetuation, will lobby, threaten and bully spineless legislators into
driving another stake into personal responsibility and dignity.
May 1 -
San Francisco tackles alcohol
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For
52 years the North Beach Festival has been packing in a crowd enjoying a day in
the sun, good music, good food and drink. This year, in its newly assumed
role of public nanny, the Park and Recreation Department is proposing that the
event be "alcohol free."
It's for the children, so it
is said, but in San Francisco, where every public entity is subservient to
Public Health, Park and Rec is merely following its marching orders.
Public Health hates smoking and smokers so several years ago Park and Rec banned
smoking in all playgrounds. A total ban in all city parks duly followed.
Public Health hates drinking and drinkers so they too must go. While the
alcohol ban is unlikely to be imposed at this year's Festival it will be brought
up until the free-spirited, liberal and oh so tolerant politicians who are
completely under the thumb of Public Health embrace yet one more manifestation
of intolerant prohibition.
May 1 -
Beer fights back
- Maybe some business have learned some lessons from Big Tobacco's capitulation
to anti-smoking organizations. At last year's National Beer Wholesalers
Association convention the rhetoric was satisfyingly sharp:
- There are foes poised to
destroy us. We need to fight for beer's rightful place in American
culture [and] regain what is rightfully ours.
- They are zealots. They
are ideologues. They will keep pushing and pushing and it is way past time
for the industry to fight back. We can't compromise with people who don't
want to [us] to be in business."
The Beer wholesalers know who
the enemies are pointing to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the American
Medical Association. Where Big Tobacco made its peace with the
prohibitionists, much to the detriment of its customers, beer interests may
realize that the first order of business is to destroy the mercantile interests
that profit from prohibition.
April 3 -
Prohibitionists strike back -
Over
the past several years alcohol interests, especially the vintners,
have touted studies that show a health benefit when alcohol is
"moderately" consumed. The methods to produce these studies
are the same used to produce anti-smoking studies which is not to
say that moderate alcohol use doesn't lead to improved health.
Epidemiology isn't science and when utilized to prove a point
promoted by special interests it can be manipulated to "prove"
anything.
From the University of California -
San Francisco, the font of much of the anti-smoking junk science,
comes a review of the research that promotes moderate alcohol study.
Not surprisingly the "researchers" conclude that the pro-alcohol
research is flawed. What now follows is an argument between
the pro-alcohol crowd and anti-alcohol, each thrusting volumes of
data into the face of the other. The winner will not be
determined by which position is true, since epidemiology cannot
determine that. Instead the winner will be the faction with
the most political juice. At this time, bet on the
prohibitionists.
March 24 -
Arresting drinkers, in bars -
Police
in a Dallas suburb, perhaps inspired by that city's smoking
ban, swept through bars arresting patrons for being
"intoxicated." Officials describe the raids as a
pre-emptive strike against drunk driving. In other
words the arrested bar patrons not because they had
committed the crime of driving while drunk but because they
might drive while impaired. Critics of the raid point
out that the police didn't know whether those picked up were
with "designated drivers" or whether they relied on cabs or
other means of transportation. It's only a matter of
time before the anti-alcohol crowd, inspired by the success
of the anti-smoking fanatics, will opening promote the plan
to "denormalize" and eliminate drinking.
February 3 -
History of failure - Lost in the battle to eliminate
smoking is the nascent movement to
reevaluate alcohol prohibition.
Think
the horrors unleashed by alcohol prohibition last
century are dead and buried? Think again. Mark
Thorton's analysis of national prohibition provides the
truth about the "noble experiment"
January 30 -
Eliminating alcohol sales -
San
Francisco Bay Area Muslims accused fellow Muslims who own liquor
stores of abandoning their faith and poisoning their communities.
The condemnation follows several disturbing incidents last November
when gangs of young men trashed liquor stores shouting anti-alcohol
slogans as the terrified shop owners looked on.
The anti-alcohol crusaders have adopted
the "progressive" tactics that infect the Bay Area by setting up a
group with a soothing name and staging nonviolent marches to liquor
stores run by Muslims. Their goal, however, is as coercive as
that espoused by the rampaging marauders; and end to sales of a
lawful substance legally enjoyed by consumers. Perhaps the
"grass roots" organizations set up by tobacco control can join
forces with the Muslims to bring the shop keepers to heel. January 20 -
Warm beer -
A
Missouri politician authored a bill that would make it unlawful for
stores to sell chilled beer. Such a law, he says, will cut
down on drunk driving since boozers will eschew the warm suds while
driving. Of course most people who buy a pack of beer want to
take it home and drink it there but inconsideration is the byword of
today's soft, but hardening, neo-prohibition.
Appropriately
his brainwave comes courtesy of fifth-grade student showing once
again that behavior controllers operate with the emotional maturity
of children. |
