Because those health warnings are meaningless to begin with. We know it’s bad for us, we don’t need a nanny state to hold our hands at the same time.
We know it’s bad for us
You have the knowledge in the back of your mind. The warnings make you have it in active thought.
we don’t need a nanny state
Do you truly believe consumers usually/always make rational and reasonable decisions, that don’t go against their own interests?
Alcohol is a massive tax revenue in pretty much everywhere in the world, but especially here in Canada. It’s pretty obvious when you see the difference in price of a beer here compared to the states, as 90% of that difference is purely taxes. Hell, you can tell the difference between the beer/wine costs in Ontario vs in Quebec. There’s a reason why people in Ottawa and Gatineau constantly cross the boarder to buy their poison of choice.
That said, there’s also the fact that when the States tried to ban it, they basically created some of the richest criminals in the world in like a single year. Alcohol is so ingrained into modern society that people riot over it.
Tobacco is a comfort luxury that pretty much anybody can get off of with some effort. Alcohol is a crutch that far too many people use to avoid going to some pretty dark places.
Alcohol is a crutch that far too many people use to avoid going to some pretty dark places.
You could also argue, that alcohol leads to these pretty dark places in the first place. If your coping mechanism with problems in your life is to drink them away, well, that won’t work in the long run.
It does. But for those that use alcohol as a crutch, its use makes those problems feel further away. Especially if you don’t know how to deal with the problems, or just desperately need some relief before tackling the problem (even if it means that you never get to it until it explodes in your face), alcohol is an easy way to pretend that a problem doesn’t exist.
Why do you think so many homeless are also alcoholics? I doubt all of them were alcoholics before becoming homeless, and even for those who were, there’s a reason why they’re still drinking tons of alcohol. All throughout human history, alcohol was known as man’s best friend because life was tough, and it let you forget that fact for a while. Or at least make it feel less bad.
My point was, that it is an illusion, that consuming alcohol will help with most of the problems. Okay, for something like grief, where you mostly heal with time, it might not make it actively worse. But for every issue, that you need to tackle proactively, it does nothing. No, it even makes it worse, because you won’t deal with your problem while you are drunk and not even on the next day, because you will most likely be hangover. Alcohol not only messes with your body, but also with your brain. Post-drinking depression is a thing. You get your respite and a curve ball of even worse emotions the days afterwards. Really helpful.
You make running away from your problems sound like a good thing. It isn’t. Alcohol is an easy way out, until you slide down the slippery slope to addiction and it fucks up even more of your life. It is the same with other drugs. Oh, I feel so stressed, I need a cigarette and boom, you can’t do without cigarettes anymore. Oh, I am so tired, I need caffeine to function. No, you need more sleep.
I would like a ban on advertising, too.
Warnings now do appear on the back of alcohol in the EU but they’re usually small things on the back of the label stating the units of alcohol in the bottle & warning about drinking while pregnant or whatever.
Problem with these is they state some tiny amount equivalent to like half a glass of wine as the most you should have in a day, even though in the real world… basically anyone who drinks has a at least a little bit more than that and the moderate majority are fine and not on death’s door. I know 70 and 80 year olds in the pub who must drink 10+ units a day (I actually notice the oldies are the worst for wanting like 6%+ ABV beers) and are still there doing fine. So it has a bit of a “boy who cried wolf” effect to slap warnings on about drinking more than 14 units a week / 2 a day / whatever when at least in the UK like “everyone” drinks more than that. It just becomes a lauging stock, “look at that silly over-cautious nanny label”. If there should be any warning, IMO it’d be not to binge. If you can’t remember what happened the next morning, you drank too much, and it’s if you do that too often that it’s a major health risk.
Drinking more than these labelled amounts isn’t good for you, but health warnings should be more closely aligned to “really bad for you” to be taken seriously imo.
Well, because even those tiny amounts have a negative effect on your body. Instead of laughing about it, maybe you should consider, that you and everyone around you consumes too much alcohol? It’s exactly the 1 beer a day, that leads to addiction (and, possibly, cancer).
He’s talking about how the standard unit of alcohol definition bears no resemblance to anything people actually interact with in the real world. For example, one unit of alcohol is ~200mL of a typical beer. When was the last time you saw beer sold in 200mL containers?
He is saying that if you want to communicate such ideas to people you need to speak to them at their level, not something geared towards scientists. If you ask random people on the street how much beer one drink is, they will likely tell you it is one pint (473mL), when in reality that is more than two drinks.
And when one finds out that, they are not going to reel in horror, they are going to laugh at how out of touch someone was to communicate that idea so poorly.
