Alcohol: Harmful Messages & Ways To Reduce Harm

I appear to be one of the only humans in the universe who doesn't currently strive to alter her/his consciousness through psychoactive drugs.  I certainly understand some of the motivations behind it -- life is short, the relationships between the humans are thorny and rife with conflict, the world is baking so why shouldn't I get baked too?, and all that -- but personally, I didn't really linger on those paths for long.  My psychoactive drug experiences, limited as they were, stayed confined to alcohol and marijuana.  And from my times at road-end bonfires and too-loud bars and after-parties and back-stage events, the majority of violence and aggression I saw was from those folks high on booze rather than those high on pot, so if we as a society wish to curb violence and aggression, we need to take a hard, evidence-based look at reducing alcohol consumption.

I've been reading a book entitled "Drugs Without The Hot Air" from a British professor called David Nutt, and it's periodically quite a slog, due to the sad and depressing insights as to the state of modern science (as well as the general results of the intersection between humanity and psychoactives, too).  But what really caught my eye was his section on alcohol, the original date rape drug and the major source of tons of human suffering and pain.  Nutt doesn't live in Fantasyland, either, which makes his blunt observations all the more potent.  While we're not going to eliminate the many motivations for alcohol use, he argues that there are two areas of social focus that we're not hitting, and that more substantial efforts in these two areas would cut back some of the overconsumption of alcohol.

Nutt summarizes a report from the European Centre for Monitoring Alcohol Marketing entitled The Seven Key Messages of the Alcohol Industry, messages that Nutt wisely calls out as distortions of reality at best and outright lies at worst.  Those seven key messages are as follows:

1. Consuming alcohol is normal, common, healthy and very responsible.
2. The damage done by alcohol is caused by a small group of deviants who cannot handle alcohol.
3. Normal adult non-drinkers do not, in fact, exist.
4. Ignore the fact that alcohol is a harmful and addictive chemical substance (ethanol) for the body.
5. Alcohol problems can only be solved when all parties work together.
6. Alcohol marketing is not harmful -- it is simply intended to assist the consumer in selecting a certain product or brand.
7. Education about responsible use is the best method to protect society from alcohol problems.

Nutt then methodically and systematically exposes the heaping piles of bullshit in each of those messages, bullshit that economically favors multinational corporations and is deleterious to the social and economic health of the average citizen.  (Although Nutt doesn't make this point, any similarities between key messages between the industries of alcohol and firearms is purely coincidental.)  Once he decimates those key messages and examines in detail the issue of harm production from alcohol, he then discusses how to reduce the harm done by alcohol in clear and cogent ways:

1. Increase the price.
2. Restrict availability.
3. Make alcohol a national health priority.
4. Make alcohol dependence a priority for the National Treatment Agency.
5. Stop people binge drinking.
6. Save lives on the road.
7. Provide alternatives.

Note that nowhere does Nutt argue that we should eliminate alcohol from our society, and I'm certainly not in favor of that, either.  After all, we actually have evidence as to what happens when a top-down prohibition against alcohol consumption occurs, and no one wants to revisit those days.  However, we'll never get a handle on our national problem with alcohol if we don't institute controls against economic and social factors that promote cheap and abundant alcohol, as well as divorce ourselves from the notion that corporations can be rational actors in matters of public health.

Finally, the longer we socially and economically deny ourselves the benefits of legal alternatives to alcohol, whether it's marijuana or something else, the longer we must endure alcohol-related sexual assaults on college campuses and drunk driving fatalities and the health care burden of alcoholism and so forth.  And for our police officers, I'm sure that they would rather deal with a laughing dude high on pot rather than a screaming dude high on alcohol.  After all, I never saw Shaggy physically and verbally abuse Scooby Doo for eating all those Scooby Snacks.