How about we start treating alcohol like smoking? For example ban alcohol advertising like we have with tobacco and I bet society would improve in a lot of unforeseen ways (besides the obvious reduction in alcohol related deaths and diseases and family issues).
For most people, alcohol isn’t addictive in the same way that smoking or sugar is. If you eat stuff with a lot of sugar it makes things without sugar actually taste worse. Whereas drinking alcohol doesn’t make water taste worse or whatever.
Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year, way less than smoking or sugar.
If you're referring to the CDC figure, then I doubt you're making an apples-to-apples comparison. That figure's based on the deaths that are easily attributable to serious alcohol over-consumption, like cirrhosis or car wrecks. It doesn't include things like increased cancer or heart disease risk.
Whereas the oft-quoted figures for smoking and sugar are pretty much all about things like increased cancer or heart disease risk.
I'm not sure what the numbers would be like if you _did_ include those diseases in the alcohol death figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up somewhere between smoking and sugar.
Fair enough, even if it kills 5% of Americans instead of 3.6% though, I doubt that more advertising restrictions would make much difference. I’d much rather reinstate the ban on DTC prescription drug ads.
Is there any reliable source to back up the claim that sugar is more addictive than alcohol?
I am suspicious about this claim because there are plenty of people and families ruined directly as a result of alcoholism. I don’t think sugar addiction is causing nearly as much trouble as alcoholism, despite being a more widely consumed and easily available substance.
The number of "Obese People" far outweighs the number of chronic alcoholics... we are talking about almost 1/3rd of the population being obese (i.e. not just a bit fat, or chubby, just straight out obese).
Is obesity a sign of sugar addiction? I don’t think so. People addicted to substances like alcohol and heroin will go out of their way to obtain these substances breaking laws and ruining others’ lives if necessary. While obese people are just... obese, not crazy nor dangerous. Their mind don’t get wired by sugar to put sugar in front of decency and laws.
Not to mention sugar is not the only cause of obesity anyway. Sedentary lifestyle, hormones, gut bacteria, and the portion sizes in the US are all likely causes.
> While obese people are just... obese, not crazy nor dangerous.
If you could wave a magic wand, wouldn't most obese people prefer a healthy weight? In aggregate, we can add up individual decisions and call the average "human nature." The actions of society have forced individuals to live with bodies that don't function as well as they could, so it makes sense for us to do something about the problem.
How well do we understand the causes of the obesity epidemic? Is sugar responsible for, say, 10% or 90% of the total? If we wish to progress toward a low-sugar future, then it would be good to have an estimate of how much good it would do.
I’d question if this is purely the result of a sugar addiction. This is a very American figure, other countries have less problems, even though sugar is widely available.
Obesity has a variety of contributing factors, (lack of) access to actual healthy food, lack of physical exercise, high calorie intake (certainly aided by sugar), ...
31 BMI is highly unhealthy, i know it was mine 2 years ago. You don't look "obese", but when fat start to show on your cheeks, you have to stop eating that much sugar immediatly. I'm less than 30 and i my ankle/knees are hurting like i was 40. I couldn't run, and running is still really, really hard on my ankles (after 40 minute i start to feel lot of pain). Even walking too much (more than ~7/8 kilometers) hurts. It's not beause you don't "look" obese than you are not. And i have freaking hearth issue (it's not genetic, none of my grandparent ever had heart issues, and most of my great-grandparent lived to 100 yo or near that.
I still have 26.8 BMI and i'm aiming 23-24 as i'm not a very muscular guy.
I'll have to agree though, alcoolism is worst than low obesity. Etanol is as bad as fructose for the liver, and worst for everything else too.
Sugar isn't the cause of obesity though. I think people that try to blame it all on sugar are simply looking for a scapegoat. It's easier to actually over eat on fat than on sugar because of a higher caloric density. Carbs are just cheaper so they get added to everything as bulk.
Just a sidenote, sugar addiction starts way earlier fe. 6-7 year old kids are much more likely to eat too much sugar. Alcohol kicks in quite later and likely causes more damage to people around the subject, I agree with that.
I think you are underestimating the costs of alcohol on society by reducing it to "just" a death count. I won't deny that sugar consumption is a public health crisis.
But on the other hand, consuming sugar mainly only harms yourself. People that consume sugar (usually) don't go kill innocent people or tear apart their family or cause all sorts of permanent physical and mental issues in children.
Is the next step forbidding dangerous hobbies like mountain climbing? Maybe taking more than one job to support a large family or accumulate college funds for one's children--"you're not getting enough sleep, which increases health care costs that we pay for."
Yes, if people need to work multiple jobs that is an indication of a huge societal problem. The workers in those jobs are being abused by the society and collectively we should fix it.
We should change the law to make sure that every job pays a living wage, so that people are not forced to work 60+ hours per week at irregular hours plus commute time etc. just to survive. We should increase social support for families and children. We should strive to reduce the cost of housing, transportation, healthcare, and education.
Our society is rich enough to dramatically increase public funding for primary and secondary education and adequately train and support career teachers, dramatically increase funding for social workers, mental health professionals, etc.
> and adequately train and support career teachers
I always love the 'teachers' pay discussions and argument. While there are many teachers that are dedicated and do a great job there are also many who go into it for the (at one point not sure if it's true everywhere still) guaranteed retirement money and summers off. Also if a career doesn't pay enough for whatever lifestyle you want or place you want to live perhaps you can give thought to either relocating somewhere else or before you pick that career (for whatever reason) what the pay and benefits are for your choice. For sure not everyone is in a position to do this but my guess is most don't even give that thought. Meaning for example they decide to become a teacher in a very expensive place (NYC let's say) and then even at $90k per year can't afford to lead a decent life style. They could probably move 60 miles west from NYC (to say rural Pennsylvania) and earn less and have a better life. But then they wouldn't be in NYC, right? And they've decided
they have to be there. As any immigrant who has left their family and the familiarity of a foreign country would tell you sometimes you have to relocate somewhere else if it's not good where you are.
> so that people are not forced to work 60+ hours per week at irregular hours plus commute time etc
You'd have to look at the total picture of how they are spending their money though.
> forbidding dangerous hobbies like mountain climbing?
Well not that it would ever happen but why should I pay for someone's dangerous and/or foolish risky activity? (Rescue, health care and so on). People often act as if there is a large pot of money sitting around to cover any and all mistakes and life choices someone makes.
Sure. But there are 300,000 obesity-related deaths per year. Obesity- and sugar-related issues are less likely to result in ER-type scenarios, but are nevertheless pervasive.
> Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year
Important to point out that the negative health impact of any 'vice' (and you can consider sugar a vice given this discussion) go way beyond just 'death'. There are so many negative impacts that are significant vs. just 'how many people die'. For example health care costs and related health problems (which result in economic impact as well as costs for everyone).
Not to mention there are social limitations to alcohol consumption. Eg. you wouldn't normally drink whisky on the bus or at work (unless you happen to be a character from "Mad Men"), but there aren't many times nor places where eating a chocolate bar is frowned upon.
> If you eat stuff with a lot of sugar it makes things without sugar actually taste worse.
You can still eat less sugary stuff in general (which is what most people do). Changing your taste is not addiction, it's a reasonable shift in preferences.
> only kills 80k or so Americans per year
Society may care more about alcohol addiction because it tends to affect people other than the alcohol consumer.
the second is not a good source. The title is misleading as the article itself says experts don't agree.
I don't think it's clear what is an "addiction", as addiction is part of how humans (and all brains) work. reinforcement of reward is necessary for normal function. The most discrete sign of addiction would be the molecular switch DeltaFosB which is manifest in behavioral and drug addictions. However, for things like sugar things are more nuanced.
The two are also hard to compare side-to-side because alcohol addiction is like 50-70% genetic, and the effects tend affect other people more severely while sugar basically harms the person who eats it.
That's the genetic fallacy. They link to a number of other sources from that article with supporting information such as a Connecticut College study and a Princeton University study. I would deem university sources "good" (although you're still subject to cherry-picking and the like)
Alcohol consumption is by choice by adults, where as sugar consumption is not - children's food are mostly sugary items today in the market. They get addicted by the time they are teenagers, and for many of them (30% or above of all the kids), due to resulting obesity, rest of their lives are spent fixing/fighting it - depression and health issues.
It’s banned in Iceland. The big breweries simply offer a low alcohol with the same branding and advertise those. Poor tourists end up being the only ones buying them, not knowing they are low alcohol, as they are allowed to sell the low alcohol beers in the grocery stores while regular beer can only be sold at the state run liqueur stores.
Vodka companies in Poland were even more inventive. One of them started a yacht rental enterprise (or something along these lines), and proudly advertised "łódka Bols". "Łódka" meaning a boat, and coincidentally rhyming with "wódka" (or vodka).
Another opened a horse holiday farm, whose abbreviation - "WTK", following the brand's well recognizable name - happens to sound pretty much like "wódka" :)
No, the government shouldn't be restricting behavior unless there is a good reason to do so.
German constitutional principles only permit restricting basic rights (this seems to affect free speech, at least in its US definition) if it is "proportional" (verhältnismäßig) - restricting only what is absolutely necessary to reach a legitimate goal.
More specifically, it has to be suitable, necessary, and appropriate/non-excessive ("geeignet, erforderlich und angemessen").
A law that doesn't achieve the stated goal would fail the "suitable" test.
That it doesn't work in Russia is far from proof that it couldn't work elsewhere.
Edit: Prohibition on advertising is not prohibition on alcohol. I reject the relevance of this suggested equivalency. There is no risk of organized crime getting supercharged by a prohibition on alcohol advertisements.
{ "Advertising increases demand for a product.", "Banning advertising does not reduce demand for a product." }
I think you really do gotta pick one there, because each implies the other's opposite.
You don't really even need two different studies to demonstrate "demand is higher in the presence of advertising" and "demand is lower in the absence of advertising". It's mathematically impossible to experimentally demonstrate one without also demonstrating the other.
Not entirely sure where I'm going with this. But I would say that failure to prove that a group of people responds to advertising is not the same thing as proving that a group of people does not respond to advertising. So, if we really have demonstrated that banning advertising didn't have an effect on demand for alcohol in Russia, we'd expect to also see that alcohol companies don't even want to advertise their products in Russia, because they know it would just be wasting money. Do we see that?
Isn't a third option for advertising simply to increase brand awareness? It's been a while since I last watched TV, but I remember ads for laundry detergent for example.
Is it reasonable to say that people wash their clothes more often because there's ads for laundry detergent on tv? I think these ads were designed to make you grab their product when you're in the super market because you've seen their brand before. I remember I recently bought a bottle of shampoo and realized the only reason i grabbed this particular one was that i immediately recognized it because i saw their ads on TV over a decade ago.
If we assume that most people drink socially, then I think it's not unreasonable to think that consumption doesn't really increase with advertising. You probably don't go out with friends for a beer more often because you saw an ad for a particular brand of beer.
Alcohol as a party drug now competes with other party drugs in many markets. Particularly cannabis. This is one reason performance of advertising bans might differ from region to region. Cannabis as a party drug has a pretty broad advertising ban in most places, but alcohol does not. If it's a matter of convincing consumers to buy one party drug instead of the other, an alcohol advertising ban could be highly effective in these particular regions.
>You probably don't go out with friends for a beer more often because you saw an ad for a particular brand of beer.
That's an unjustified assumption. It may very well be the case that "go out with friends for a beer" is such a popular default because it's depicted in advertising and media so often. If your only choice was to drink, then it's easy to see that advertising for alcohol is solely about influencing which alcohol you pick. But that's not the real world, where drinking does compete for attention with other activities.
Alcohol consumption is primarily a cultural phenomena (consumption rates vary GREATLY from country to country. In France people drink 12.2 liters of pure alcohol a year, while in Turkey they drink 2 per year. Neither of these countries are even on either extreme...) Cultures can be changed; history has shown that there is no such thing as an immutable culture. Advertising impacts culture, that is well documented. All of these things we should know. So to suggest that demand for alcohol is immutable seems quite absurd.
> So to suggest that demand for alcohol is immutable seems quite absurd.
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I suggested this. I'm also not interested in an emotional discussion on alcohol advertisement bans, because I frankly don't care.
It's a third option, but it doesn't seem all that likely to me. It's much easier to see how demand for laundry detergent would be inelastic than to see how demand for alcoholic beverages would be inelastic.
It could also be the case that advertising changes which particular product people choose (say, which brand of beer), but doesn't affect the demand for beer overall.
All good points. Furthermore it's easy to consider the possibility that in different cultural contexts the consumer demand for alcohol is driven by different factors. It may be the case that in one region alcohol consumption is driven by advertisements that promote it as a party drug, while in another region alcohol consumption is driven by oppressive poverty and bleak outlooks on life.
In other words, the reason a 40 year old coal miner with black lung drinks every day might be different from the reason a 19 year old frat bro drinks on friday and saturday evenings.
I dont have a strong opinion on the topic of alcohol advertising, but, on your core point advertising can also attempt to take market share rather than grow the market.
If you advertise a craft beer to take share from budwiser, its possible that no additional beer was drank, but the ads were still effective
It significantly shifts the onus on people who want it banned to prove it would work though. "In country X they do policy Y and it works/doesn't work" is a much stronger argument than "Yeah but in our country it's different."
I guess it depends on what you mean by "helped". I've seen a few figures, none of which indicated that it had no effect on alcohol consumption in the US, and none of which indicated that it came anywhere close to eradicating alcohol consumption, either. It's naturally hard to estimate, given that it was all done clandestinely so there aren't really any official figures to use, but I got the impression that you could say with some measure of confidence that it reduced consumption by somewhere between 30% and 70%.
Alcohol helps people socialize and is significantly harder to get addicted to. It's also far less harmful when consumed in moderation, no matter how many elusive studies want to push how "there is no safe alcohol dosage" because you might have 15% more risk of cancer in 30 years or something. I agree advertising is bad but you're going to have a hell of a hard time convincing billions of people that they should stop socializing the easy way.
Alcohol helps people socialize and is significantly harder to get addicted to – the 1st part of your sentence seems to contradict the 2nd: nowadays people can't think of getting together and not drinking and that's to me exactly because they got addicted to socializing under alcohol so much they can't socialize normally without it.
And that’s reinforced by advertisement over and over again.
While there are so many fun activities not involving alcohol. Seems like most of team building events nowadays boils down to pretentious dinner plus drinking to celebrate?
Are you sure about that? It has negatively affected millions of people in the US.
"A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month finds that the rate of alcohol use disorder, or what's colloquially known as “alcoholism,” rose by a shocking 49 percent in the first decade of the 2000s."
I'm talking about typical usage in a social setting. People may drink a few beers a couple days in a week for months, or even years, and quit without any issues. Hardly the same with an equivalent "social dose" in cigarettes.
Another thing we can do is to demand an FDA-approval process for recreational drugs! Dr. David Nutt has been developing a safer alcohol alternative, Alcarelle [1], but is having trouble finding a foothold in the marketplace as we have no process for safe-substance certification!
Um, prohibition is the complete ban of all alcohol.
umvi is proposing the ban of alcohol related advertising. One is completely different than the other.
The Scandinavian countries show that if you do not prohibit completely, but just make people jump through some hoops to get it and/or make it very expensive, it sort of works.
I find that there is much more smoking (including indoor) and drinking in Denmark than most of any other place I lived, or maybe I am just older now and can’t the hangovers are much longer??
Maybe they meant Sweden/Norway only? I'm not sure. I think the alcohol tax in Sweden is like a full 7x higher than Denmark. I could be wrong there. This is second hand from an old co worker, and years out of date.
I've lived in countries with extremely liberal alcohol laws: low taxes, liberal advertising, 24/7 availability, drinking allowed on the street.
I've lived in others where Alcohol advertising is banned, availability is limited to Government-run stores at certain times, and the taxes are very high.
Binge drinking and general abuse seemed to be much higher in the latter. Particularly people seemed to get drunk before leaving the house, or used drugs, since both were cheaper than buying alcohol at a venue.
If anything is going to be restricted in the form of tax or advertising, hard spirits should bear the brunt instead of beer and wine. It might also make sense to loosen up taxes at licensed venues, which are controlled environments with trained bartenders and security.
I distinctly recall these (and much more restrictive) measures having been tried in the U.S. almost exactly 100 years ago, to a very modest success. Sugar seems to be an easier target, because there are sweeteners like aspartame. Alcohol almost by definition doesn't have a healthy replacement.
AFAICT, there's not much definitive research that shows the harms of cannabis consumption. I'm aware of the research that clearly counterindicates usage by teenagers and young adults due to continued brain development issues, but is there evidence that cannabis consumption is unhealthy otherwise?
I think even the larger cohort studies failed to connect joint smoking with ear/nose/throat/lung cancer, much to the consternation of people who like to throw down the "combusting and inhaling anything has to be bad for you" statement.
Thanks but no thanks. I'm a moderate consumer of wine and I just love it. It's good for health, it supplements food in a great way, it rarely gets you drunk and it tastes great. Sure, if you can't hold your liquor eventually it will kill but so will do everything you eat or drink if you consume it in great quantities.
Would limiting alcohol advertising really have that dramatic an effect on the 'good' wine market? I can't recall the last time I bought a decent bottle of wine because it was advertised.
Yes because I don't trust reviews. I do on the other hand trust specific brands that I've tried before. So if they have a new label I'd like to know it. And the best way to know that is from ads on printed magazines.
A small amount of wine has been shown in small scale studies to have a moderate health benefit (though it's possible that's due to economic factors), most wine users consume far more wine than was studied.
Enjoy your drugs, but don't kid yourself that you are consuming bacteria excrement for your health.
