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Over 20 years ago the Royal College of Physicians set what it called safe limits for the consumption of alcohol. Since then the government has continuously pumped out the message that it is dangerous for men to drink more than 21 units and women 14 units each week. Ten years after this campaign started Dr Richard Smith said drinking guidelines were plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence it was “more of an intelligent guess.”
This made no difference whatever to the persistent, and expensive, nagging to stay within the limits or your health could be seriously damaged. Now MP‘s have decided that it is their turn to decide how much alcohol we ought to drink. The House of Commons Science & Technology Committee will be comparing UK guidance with that in other countries and examining the evidence base of these guidelines. What is the betting that the evidence used elsewhere for their propaganda campaigns is just the same as Dr Smith has told us was used in Britain.
When the MP’s, who do not have the medical or scientific knowledge to do what they say they are going to do, they will make recommendations to the chief medical officers. When they have made this new guess about what drinking levels to preach at us our Parliamentarians will “look at official attempts to educate the public about alcohol abuse.”
That could be a good idea. In the 20 years since the Department of Health has been throwing our taxes at pestering people to drink less, alcohol related deaths have doubled. This should be an extremely good lesson that this public ‘education’ is worse than useless.
People will always want to use alcohol because they have done so since the earliest information we have about humans. What is most likely to result in people drinking more than is good for them is that they are not content with their lives. Some causes of discontent are having less money than you would like because of high taxes; being bullied by a hectoring government into doing things differently than you would choose; being lied to by authority figures who claim knowledge of things that they do not know; and having a government wastes the money of its citizens instead of creating the conditions for them to be better off.
We know that booze has risks, now shut up and leave us to decide when we fancy a drink.
I suspect that any admission that the unit figures are based on a finger iin the air will be swiftly followed by the assertion that there isn’t any safe limits, in the same way as they say there’s no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke and thus we learn of third-hand and even fourth-hand smoke.
Quite right TT.
I think a lot of us hold the view that the social engineers who have such a grip on our interfering government are set on a programme of phasing out tobacco use completely and they are succeeding at a fairly fast pace.
This objective doesn’t really have anything to do with health, it is the age old desire of those who regard themselves as enlightened to direct everybody else to the true and righteous path. The enlightenment of the manipulators didn’t need evidence and they are not bothered about facts in advancing their campaign.
This is a quasi-religious process analogous to fasting, wearing uncomfortable clothes or other deprivations to bring the penitent closer to purity. It is not long since I heard some imbecile on Radio 4 say that mothers who went outside to smoke needed to change all their clothes before interacting with their child and that they must wash the ‘smokey’ clothing several times before using it again in the presence of children.
The next stages of making smoking impossible have already been declared. Laws against smoking in cars in which children travel, no smoking in public parks in many areas, no smoking in your own garden if you have children, and no smoking in the streets of Stony Stratford. The indicators are very clear.
Prohibitionists have learned the lessons of failure in 20th century USA. They will follow the gradualist anti-smoking model. Expect ever more constraint on when, where and how you can drink alcohol. Being a ‘responsible’ drinker will not let you escape.
Mal, reading this stuff makes me want a drink – how about you?
Already had a couple mate. Safely over the limit for today.