Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. How many times have I said that?
Australian health campaigners are now urging that draconian restrictions applied to tobacco should now be extended to alcohol.
"The Cancer Council of Australia argues even one drink is dangerous, a view similar to its position that even one cigarette can injure health."
So goodbye to the convenient fiction that moderate amounts of alcohol are beneficial to health. And yet more evidence that Australia, once a byword for rugged individualism, is fast becoming the world’s foremost Nanny State.
And some of you thought that the anti-tobacco campaign was something that could be entirely separated from the anti-alcohol campaign?
This has already been mentioned by Dick Puddlecote and Chris Snowdon, amongst others, but many visitors here won’t be readers of the political blogs.
Ah yes, but smoking is a unique case... the WHO/EU/DoH only have non-smokers' health in mind... pubs are so much better now that you can't smoke in them... only conspiracy theorists think that the ban is part of a wider campaign to curtail civil rights... er... it's all to do with beer prices?
ReplyDeleteSorry, had a moment there as A CLUELESS FOOL.
Again, it's one of the things I keep saying but it falls on deaf ears or is derided. Perhaps in ten or fifteen years I'll get people coming up to me telling me I was right.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't being fat (I should know), or liking a drink, or being a smoker that is the most damaging to health, but the constant white-noise of nannying, 'friendly advice', chivvying along and occasional abusive comments from random strangers that does the damage.
People won't change their habits, they'll just become very unhappy instead. I feel for them.
You cannot choose which liberties to defend, only whether to defend liberty. Smoking is approaching absolute prohibition, drinking at home and low cost alcohol is routinely attacked by the main drinkers consumer group of the UK and it's only a matter of time before the notion that pubs are "controlled" and "responsible" is seen for the fallacy it is.
ReplyDeleteThis paper was produced by the World Health Organization (WHO)in 2009 called "WHO Public Hearing on
ReplyDeleteHarmful Use of Alcohol." Yes the way that they intend to deal with drinkers is exactly the way they have dealt with tobacco. Mine and your plight has only just begun.
"Governments and citizens around the world could: pursue a global health-based approach to alcohol control, including the adoption of a Framework Convention on Alcohol Control, modeled on the Tobacco Convention that came into force in 2005."
Alcohol is just as bad as tobacco, its the WHO so they must be right.
"There is a growing recognition that alcohol is a global health issue. Alcohol has recently been identified as one of the world’s top ten health risks, accounting for about the same
amount of global burden of disease as tobacco. Alcohol consumption is causally related to more than 60 types of disease and injury, and is linked to a variety of social problems.
Global alcohol consumption has increased in recent decades, with most or all of the increase occurring in developing countries."
Never democracy, written agreements and free trade.
"A global health-based approach to alcohol control outside the trade treaty realm, modeled on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which came into force in
2005, is likely to prove more effective. A Framework Convention on Alcohol Control would provide an important means for governments and citizens around the word to avoid trade treaty interference in the vital task of reducing the global harm caused by alcohol."
Can I ask drinkers and CAMRA to wake and smell the coffee.
http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/activities/5other.pdf
I've often talked of a future in which drinkers have to join smokers outside pubs whenever they want to take a swig.
ReplyDeleteThose allowed to stay inside to do their thing will be the diners with their garlic mushrooms and the kids with their soft play areas.
At least restricting them to a single drink will save those future ale lovers from having to rush to the doorway every couple of minutes.