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Bud Blamed In Absurd E.R. Visit Study

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medicine
That the neo-prohibitionists are rife with propaganda is well documented, but this one may take the cake. A new study at John Hopkins, conducted by David Jernigan, appears to show that Budweiser is the most popular drink “most commonly linked to emergency room visits.” Apparently “Budweiser has 9.1 percent of the national beer market, and represents approximately 15 percent of the E.R. ‘market.'” After Bud, it was “Steel Reserve Malt Liquor, Colt 45 malt liquor, Bud Ice (another malt liquor), Bud Light, and a discount-priced vodka called Barton’s.” Another malt liquor brand, “King Cobra, account[s] for only 2.4 percent of the U.S. beer market, but accounted for 46 percent of the beer consumed by E.R. patients.” The conclusion, as reported by NBC News, was that “[o]verall, malt liquor and lower alcohol beer dominated consumption but vodka, gin, brandy and cognac were overrepresented, too.”

But despite all the attention and scary statistics and headlines — Alcohol Justice gleefully tweeted the headline Budweiser to Blame for Most Alcohol-Related ER Visits — the study itself is absurd. The story Sherrif A.J. retweeted was from Science World Report, and despite the headline, the story doesn’t back up the sensationalist tone of it at all. The “study,” if we can even call it that, consisted of giving a survey to 105 people at one inner city Baltimore E.R., in a predominately African-American neighborhood.

The study was done by David Jernigan, who in addition to being an associate professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is more importantly the director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY), a notoriously anti-alcohol organization. That affiliation is not disclosed in any of the reports on this particular “study.”

Curiously, he does admit that both the Federal Trade Commission and the National Institute on Drug Abuse both told him personally that “this kind of research cannot be done.” Did he listen? Nope, he went right ahead and jumped to all sorts of conclusions, even though there’s no clear cut causality here whatsoever. And look how they conducted the study, and persuaded people to participate:

By using a drop down menu on a small notebook computer, the survey takers managed to obtain information from patients, and to include about 400 brands, in less than five minutes. At first, Jernigan, said, many patients refused to talk. But then the survey takers, with the permission of the emergency room staff, donned white coats. After that, patients talked freely.

See what they did? They put on white lab coats, so they looked like they worked there or were E.R. doctors, and tricked people into answering. Nice.

But the news was reported that, in fact, the conclusions were sound, especially in the headlines, which is only what a majority of people will see. The problems with the study, its limitations and lack of causality is buried toward the end, well after most people stop reading. The fact that it was done by essentially a neo-prohibitionist organization is never mentioned at all. And that certainly didn’t stop Johns Hopkins from issuing a press release. The study itself was published in the journal Substance Use & Misuse, under the title Alcohol Brand Use and Injury in the Emergency Department: A Pilot Study. But none of that stopped anybody from spreading the news about how Bud, and the other brands, are directly responsible for people visiting the E.R. It couldn’t be any other reason, right?

One Drink Too Many

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no-drinking
Today’s infographic is entitled One Drink Too Many, and is subtitled “Is it the result of Nature or Nurture?” It was created by Clarity Way, which calls itself the “Premier Holistic Addiction Rehab & Drug Treatment Center.” And while there’s some great info there, there’s also some odd bits, too. For example, the odds of becoming an alcoholic if your family has a history of it or doesn’t is 50%, essentially meaning it makes no difference. The top three reasons people say they drink — to socialize, relax or just enjoy the drink — represents 88% of all reasons, meaning the vast majority of people don’t drink for the wrong reasons. Fully 68% become “happy” after three drinks, while only 1% get “angry” and just 2% are “annoying,” hardly cause for alarm. These, and many of the others, don’t seem to really indicate that alcohol abuse is the widespread problem that most neo-prohibitionists continue to insist.

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Click here to see the infographic full size.

Proving Adulthood

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old-age
As I inch closer to senior citizenship — gallop really — few things cheese me off more than continually having to prove I’m old enough to buy a drink. It’s been 33 years since I became an adult (36 really, but they changed the definition from 18 to 21 while I was in between the two). Of course, what it means to be an adult is quite the loaded question. The standard responsibilities, obligations and rights include voting, the ability to enter into contracts, marry and several others, including of course, drinking alcohol. The fact that these standards vary from nation to nation, and culture to culture, should convince you that they’re a product of each individual community, and really ought to reflect the values of the populace. And once upon a time, they did, but in my lifetime those values have been hijacked by a minority of fanatics who are committed to forcing their own values on the rest of us.

While the common sense argument that fighting for one’s country should include at least the ability to vote lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, the reverse of that argument was used to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21. People 18 to 20 could be counted on to protect our freedoms — and die for their country — but neo-prohibitionists argued that they weren’t ready to enjoy a beer. A specious argument to be sure, but they managed to tie raising the drinking age to federal highway funds, and no state could afford to remain sensible.

But for anti-alcohol fanatics even that wasn’t enough, it was just a start. And neo-prohibitionists ever since have been working tirelessly to tighten the noose on all manner of restrictions on alcohol. I remember when I was in my early 20s, signs at cash registers warned that if you look 25 or older, be prepared to show your I.D. By the time I was in my 30s, the signs had changed, too, saying roughly the same thing but making 30 the threshold. As I’ve aged, the needle keeps moving. A few years ago, Tennessee passed a law that every person, no matter how old, has to prove they’re at least 21, even if they have one foot in the grave, no exceptions.

People invariably tell me I should be flattered to look so young, and chuckle as they say it, as if I should be amused. Well, I’m not. It has nothing to do with youth. It has to do with control, and having to keep proving I’m an adult is a ridiculous indignity that grows more insulting with each passing year. We live in an increasingly Kafkaesque world where as the older I look, the more I have to prove it. As late as my 40s, I was refused service because I left my wallet at home, despite there being little doubt I was more than twice the age of majority. It’s become the modern equivalent of having to “show us your papers” (say it with a thick German accent), a sad cliche become real. Adulthood has responsibilities and obligations, of course, but it should also have a few benefits, like not having to carry our “papers” with us wherever we go.

But now Somerset, the county in southwest England, has taken this absurdity one step farther. According to a story in the This is Somerset newspaper — a Grandfather, 77, falls foul of shop’s booze rules — an elderly gentlemen was refused his purchase of beer because he was shopping with his teenage grandson. Apparently, the overzealous cashier thought the 77-year old man was buying beer for the teenager, but even after he confirmed they were related, the sale was still refused. He sent his grandson outside, but the cashier still wouldn’t budge. Commenters to the story insist that she was right to refuse the sale because that’s what the law says. And that’s probably correct, but it’s the law that’s wrong. We have to stop trying to make a perfect society through such absurd legislation. When an elderly man can’t shop with his grandchild and buy something he’s legally entitled to purchase because he could potentially turn around and do something illegal with it, that’s going too far. That’s trying to fix a perceived problem by creating a different problem for many more people than were affected by the original problem. But this is the neo-prohibitionist strategy in a nutshell. They want to make it as difficult as possible for as many people as possible. It’s using a bazooka to kill a fly. It’s about punishing everyone who drinks, not about keeping alcohol away from minors.

And so neo-prohibitionists insist that 4/5th of the adult population, or more, has to suffer on the off chance a 16-year old might get his hands on a beer. That’s not what it should mean to be an adult in any society.

UNICEF Study Of Underage Drinking Yields Surprising Results

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unicef
Actually, the results are only surprising if you’re a neo-prohibitionist or you’ve gotten all your information from them about underage drinking in the form of their relentless propaganda, posturing and fund-raising scare tactics. What a new study by UNICEF found was that the U.S. has the least number, or percentage, of kids drinking underage compared with nearly thirty developed countries. They looked at the drinking patterns of people 11, 13 and 15 years of age.

The study, Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, showed that overall the U.S. is in the bottom third, coming in number 26 of 29. Sad, really, but not terribly surprising if you’ve been paying attention. They looked at a variety of factors, and in Dimension 4 they tackled “risk behaviors,” including alcohol. Here’s how the 29 countries stacked up.

alchol-chart

Other findings that contradict the standard anti-alcohol agenda and how they tend to frame the state of underage drinking include the following.

  • More than three-quarters of the 21 countries also saw declines in alcohol use by young people – as measured by the proportion of 11-, 13- and 15-year olds who report having been drunk on at least two occasions.
  • The biggest falls were again recorded in Germany (where the alcohol abuse rate fell from 18% to under 12%) and in the United Kingdom (which saw a decline from 30% to just under 20%).

The Washington Post reported these findings, but curiously spun the story as sort of a win for the neo-prohibitionists. The author, Max Fisher, suggests that because the U.S. is the country least likely to have kids drinking it “lends a bit of credence to the U.S.’s relatively late and well-enforced drinking age, unusual in the Western world.” Of course, there’s no causal link for such a statement whatsoever, but such is the power of decades of propaganda. As the Post’s foreign affairs blogger, he should probably stick to what he knows. He continues, saying that the U.S. is “joined by the tee-totaling kids of Iceland, the Netherlands and, believe it or not, Italy.” Iceland’s minium age is 20 (although “possession or consumption of alcohol by minors is not an offense”), the Netherlands is 16 (for alcohol that’s under 15% a.b.v., 18 if over) and Italy is 16. So there’s no real pattern that can be gleaned from the countries with the lowest reported underage drinking. And in fact the rest of the top ten are either 16, 18 or even have no minimum age, so trying to link a higher minimum drinking age with lower consumption is misleading at best, a little obnoxiously anti-alcohol at worst.

In the next paragraph he then contradicts himself. “Despite the strong wine cultures in Italy, France and Spain – or maybe because of them, given the degree to which it cultivates drinking “to enjoy,” as I’ve heard many French say – children in those countries are among the least likely to get drunk.” So in those “drinking cultures,” the kids aren’t as likely to get drunk for cultural reasons, but in our drinking culture it’s due to more stringent laws? With that attitude, no wonder he was surprised by the results of UNICEF’s study.

But in two of the countries with the most vocal anti-alcohol organizations, Great Britain and the U.S., not only are both countries lower than the propaganda might suggest, both nations have falling rates of this measure, too. In the U.S., we dropped from 12% to 6%, half of what it was just eight years before, And in the UK, it dropped from 30% to below 20%, falling more than a third. But as we’re learning, for many anti-alcohol organizations it’s not about results or the mission, it’s about punishment or profit for themselves. Even as rates of underage drinking continue to fall, their rhetoric increasingly gets turned up, becoming more radicalized and intransigent as they try to squeeze the last dollars out of their followers. It probably won’t surprise you to find out that not one of the usual neo-prohibitionist groups whose websites I checked even mentioned this study, despite it having been published over a week ago. If the results had been different, it would have been on their respective homepages immediately.

child-drinking

The Neo-Prohibitionist Agenda: Punishment Or Profit

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target-alcohol
Regular bulletin readers know well my disdain for the hypocritical anti-alcohol organizations trying their damndest to remove all alcohol from society or, failing that, make everyone who makes, sells or enjoys alcohol as miserable as they are. Not surprisingly, at the recent Alcohol Policy 16 Conference, which took place in Arlington, Virginia in early April, they revealed just how far their hypocrisy extends yet again.

Angela Logomasini, who attended the conference on behalf of Wine Policy, noted that during a panel discussion on alcohol tax policy that the “entire discussion revolved around how to lobby for taxes and profit in the process.” Given that the subtitle of the entire conference was “Building Blocks for Sound Alcohol Policies,” she can be excused for believing that the discussion might involve “research related to the impact of taxes on alcohol abuse” or whether “higher taxes really reduce alcohol abuse.” Such reasonable topics, however, were not even discussed. Instead, as I said, the entirety of the talk “revolved around how to lobby for taxes and profit in the process.”

Logomasini continued her description of the panel discussion:

Rebecca Ramirez of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University presented her qualitative research on the framing of pro-tax messaging for use in lobbying campaigns. It included interviews with policymakers and activists involved in these campaigns. Ramirez’s discussion eventually turned to earmarking, which is apparently the key reason many groups are involved. Officials with one disability advocacy group, she noted, told her flat out they simply didn’t care about the public health impacts of taxes. They were in the game solely to get some of the tax revenue steered toward their organization.

She wonders aloud how that might serve the public good, and it appears she’s not the only one. Surprisingly enough, Bruce Lee Livingston, sheriff of my local anti-alcohol posse Alcohol Justice, disagrees, apparently believing profiting from lobbying efforts does not serve the public health. He takes a different view. Livingston “commented during the question and answer portion that activists are unable to get taxes high enough to actually produce positive public health benefits. Rather, he called for a ‘charge-for-harm’ approach, which is based on the assumption that anyone who drinks deserves to be punished.” That’s the same bullshit approach he took trying to get an additional tax on alcohol in San Francisco in 2010, all but writing the script for Supervisor John Avalos’ ultimately failed Alcohol Mitigation Fee Ordinance.

So, as Angela Logomasini observes, there were only two approaches or reasons to raise alcohol taxes brought up by essentially every neo-prohibitionist group in the country, or at least in attendance. As I’ve been ranting for years now, none of those reasons had anything to do with public health, or safety, or any other lofty goals. These self-proclaimed “public health advocates” only want to raise taxes on alcohol for two reasons: either to enrich themselves and profit from the alcohol companies their groups target or to punish every single person who dares to enjoy a pint of beer or glass of wine. And yet they still maintain non-profit status.

If nothing else, this should teach us that like many modern charitable organizations, they’ve strayed very far from their original purpose and self-preservation and profit are their only motives now. As I’ve said many, many times, they need a reason to exist and so they keep reinventing themselves in order to survive and keep their — in the parlance of Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles — phony baloney jobs. And so raising money becomes the driving force, not any interest in bettering the world, instead just pandering to their members’ fears, paranoia and prejudices. And if all of us who enjoy beer, and drink responsibly, get punished in the process, so what? Apparently, that’s just a bonus.

No alcoholic beverages

New Study Concludes Kids Drink Same Beers As Adults

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underage-drinking
I’m not exactly sure why this is news at all. It’s part of a series of what I call “so what” or “duh” studies that the neo-prohibitionists use to promote their anti-alcohol agenda. Really, it can best be termed “joke science,” and frankly, even using the word science is giving it too much credit. It’s more “agenda science,” propaganda masquerading as science, where the conclusion comes before the “study,” and the results fit the agreed upon conclusion every time. This one’s from CAMY, the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, as anti-alcohol a group as you’re likely to encounter. Here’s what they did.

[R]esearchers at CAMY and the Boston University School of Public Health conducted an online survey of 1,032 youth ages 13 to 20. Participants were asked about their past 30-day consumption of 898 brands of alcohol among 16 alcoholic beverage types (are there really that many well-delineated types?). They answered questions about how often and how much of each brand they consumed. The study appears in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

In a million years, you’ll never guess what they found out. Ready. Sitting down? They discovered that underage drinkers consume the same popular brands as most adults! Woo hoo, drop the balloons. What a surprise! Among the top ten brands reported, four were beers:

  1. Bud Light (27.9%)
  2. Budweiser (17%)
  3. Coors Light (12.7%)
  4. Corona Extra (11.3%)

Well, now let’s look at the top selling beer brands overall, as of Dec. 2, 2012:

  1. Bud Light (+3.27%)
  2. Coors Light (+6.18%
  3. Budweiser (-2.54%)
  4. Miller Lite (+3.32%)
  5. Natural Light (+2.07%)
  6. Corona Extra (+5.08%)

And note that Coors Light showed a better than six-percent increase, while Budweiser slipped almost three percent, so when the survey was conducted they most likely lined up, one, two, three.

According to the press release. “Of the top 25 consumed brands, 12 were spirits brands (including four vodkas), nine were beers, and four were flavored alcohol beverages.” Since they haven’t released the full list, we only know the top four brands of beer.

So however much money and resources they spent on this, what they paid for bought them the news that what adults drink and what their kids are sneaking a drink of match up almost exactly. And while most thinking adults would look at these lists and just shake their heads, the anti-alcohol CAMY sees this as revealed wisdom.

“For the first time, we know what brands of alcoholic beverages underage youth in the U.S. are drinking,” said study author David Jernigan, PhD, CAMY director. “Importantly, this report paves the way for subsequent studies to explore the association between exposure to alcohol advertising and marketing efforts and drinking behavior in young people.”

Really? We finally know what kids are drinking, do we? Thank goodness somebody finally thought to ask them, by conducting a poll. And while most reasonable people might question what these results mean, CAMY immediately leaps to the conclusion that this proves an “association between exposure to alcohol advertising and marketing efforts and drinking behavior in young people.” Holy moley, can these people spin a yarn. Without any evidence of causation whatsoever, they declare these findings show there is an association. But all it reveals is that kids drink the same brands that their parents do, that they drink the beers they have access to (i.e., can pilfer from their parents’ stash or get an older brother to buy for them). Guess what I drank when I was unable to walk into a store and buy my own beer? Whatever I could get. Do they really think that underage kids are determining in advance what brands they decide they want to drink, and then do whatever’s necessary to insure that’s what they actually get? Pul-leeze. They’ll drink whatever they can get, and be happy about it. You can’t be too picky at that age. So it’s a good thing most teenagers haven’t yet developed a discerning palate, otherwise they’d be mightily disappointed on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, the danger with this sort of junk science is that it’s then used like real science to promote a particular agenda and change public policy. For example, when the Partnership for a Drug Free America reported on it, in Study Finds Underage Drinkers Prefer Top Alcohol Brands, they concluded with this quote from CAMY director David Jernigan:

“This research will lead to insights that will inform public policy,” he says. “Everybody has gut sense that some brands are appealing to kids more than others. Now we know for which brands that is working.”

Except that there are no real insights in this at all. That it’s even in a “scientific journal,” albeit “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research” — not exactly the journal Nature — is baffling. Here’s the “Background” from the abstract: “Little is known about brand-specific alcohol consumption among underage youth.” Really, we don’t currently know what brands underage kids are drinking? Seriously, how can they print that without losing all credibility. Neo-prohibitionists have been complaining about what kids are drinking for decades, if not longer. But until we asked 1,000 teenagers to take an online survey, we had no idea which brands? Are they kidding? What a joke.

Then there’s the “Conclusions,” which frankly I’m surprised is plural, as if there is more than one conclusion. But here it is: “Underage youth alcohol consumption, although spread out over several alcoholic beverage types, is concentrated among a relatively small number of alcohol brands. This finding has important implications for alcohol research, practice, and policy.”

I can’t wait to here about the “important implications” to which they believe that future “alcohol research, practice, and policy” will be altered by the groundbreaking news that kids are drinking the same stuff their parents are drinking. Why isn’t this on the front page, above the fold, of the Grey Lady herself? But really, the question ought to be why is it news at all.

Fundação-Telefônica-Beer-for-kids
I wonder how CAMY would process this Brazilian brand created to warn about the dangers of underage drinking?

Parents Drinking Weakens Children’s Vitality

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target-alcohol
Here’s an interesting piece of history, during the temperance movement of the early 20th century, when propaganda as a science was still in its infancy. Propaganda has been around almost as long as we’ve had civilization, but really came into its own with World War I, so these prohibitionist efforts were just before that, around 1909. And it would just be a curiosity, an artifact of another time, if not for the fact that the neo-prohibitionists today continue in the sad tradition of this same kind of nonsense, never missing an opportunity to chastise adults for their parenting in an effort to demonize alcohol and remove it once more from society. For the sake of the children continues to be a popular rallying cry, and just as ridiculous today as a century ago.

safeguard-babies

Safeguarding the Babies, apparently a popular poster from the time, argued that if you as an adult drank alcohol then you were creating weak children, ones with diminished “vitality,” a term never really defined. This, the poster claims, is based on science and states that families where the parents are teetotalers only have 1.3% weakly children while families where the adults drink have kids who are 8.2% weakly. Oh, the horror! It’s a little hard to read that in the poster, but a lantern slide made a few years later by the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1914, using the same data, is more clear and even goes on to suggest that in drinking families almost of a quarter (24.8%) of their children will die while abstaining families kids will perish only 18.5% of the time. So that must mean the 6.3% difference is due entirely to their being drink in the house, right? I mean, what else could it possibly be?

slides_parents_drinking

Yet another version, this one from 1913 and created by the Scientific Temperance Federation of Boston, Massachusetts, is one of at least 50 such poster that they made available to their followers, and through their “Scientific Temperance Journal,” which is about as scientific as you might expect. At least this one actually reveals the source of the “science,” which was a survey of 109 families in a single village in Finland. In 50 of those families, the adults didn’t drink, while in the other 59 they did. That’s the study, conducted by a professor Taav. Laitinen of the University of Helsingfors, which is the University of Helsinki, and apparently published as “Report XII International Congress vs. Alcoholism.”

parents-drinking

This study, and many other similar ones, was published in the “Handbook of Modern Facts About Alcohol” By Cora Frances Stoddard, a secretary in the Scientific Temperance Federation.

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It’s hard to say if the 109 families in Laitinen’s “study” is a statistically significant cohort, but it seems unlikely. But Laitinen continued to expand his research to include more finnish families, eventually including nearly 6,000, and he continued to get predictably similar results.

parents-drinking-2

But scientific hooey aside, the message was clear. Drink, and your children will suffer. Drink, and your children are more likely to die. I tend to view the early 20th century as a more gullible time, and I can only assume many more people believed this nonsense without questioning it. Neo-prohibitionist groups today employ the same pseudo-scientific balderdash, only now they dress it up with degreed researchers and publish in slightly less questionable scientific journals, or at least ones that hide their true purpose better. But then, as now, it’s still laced with naked agenda to promote a specific cause, not to enlighten or educate for the sake of that knowledge. It is propaganda, pure and simple. The scare tactics are particularly offensive, since it calls into question the parenting of virtually anyone who drinks alcohol as somehow caring less for their children than parents who abstain. I’d love to say we live in a more enlightened age, but today’s anti-alcohol organizations continue to stoop just as low as cries of “think of the children” ring just as hollow now as when they questioned the “vitality” of our children merely by growing up in a household where drinking took place.

Higher Alcohol Taxes Reduce Tax Revenue

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beer-tax
Given that the anti-alcohol folks, and especially my churlish neighbors Alcohol Justice, are continually beating the drum about alcohol taxes being too low, this news is not going to be particularly welcomed with open arms. A British think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), recently took a close look at the effect of higher taxes in alcohol and their report, Drinking in the Shadow Economy, found that the British “Treasury is losing as much as £1.2 billion every year to the illegal alcohol industry.” That, they conclude, is one of the effects of higher taxes on alcohol, because it creates an incentive for people to go outside the law and the safe world of regulated alcohol to make a quick buck. They found that “the illicit alcohol market is also closely associated with high taxes, corruption and poverty. The affordability of alcohol appears to be the key determinant behind the supply and demand for smuggled and counterfeit alcohol.” So place too high taxes on alcohol, and you invite in the wrong element, which we’ve seen in the U.S. before during Prohibition, and which we’re seeing right now with the war on drugs. If that futile policy was reversed, we’d save as much $13.7 billion annually by legalizing, regulating and taxing just marijuana, not to mention we’d remove the criminal element, make it safer and drastically reduce burdens on police, the justice system and prisons.

But back across the pond, the study also notes that the “demand for alcohol is relatively inelastic,” meaning people generally don’t drink less when prices go up, they instead find new ways to address the rising prices. As study after study has concluded, tax hikes are regressive and almost always hit poorer families the hardest, while not eliminating the problem the proponents of such measures claim they will fix.

But here’s that again, said another way:

Our analysis indicates that the affordability of alcohol does not have a strong effect on how much alcohol is consumed. Once unrecorded alcohol is included in the estimates, it can be seen that countries with the least affordable alcohol have the same per capita alcohol consumption rates as those with the most affordable alcohol.

I suspect that’s the case here, too. We know that price hikes cause people living near borders with other states to simply buy their alcohol in the next state over, causing further economic erosion. I don’t know if we have the same issue with counterfeit or illegal beer. Certainly there’s still Moonshine, but beer is probably not profitable enough on its own to warrant illegal breweries flaunting the tax code, not to mention how labor intensive and technology-dependent it is.

Another interesting portion of the report, answering the question “Why Tax Alcohol?”

Temperance and public health campaigners typically dismiss the black market as a problem that can suppressed through rigorous enforcement and tougher sentencing. At worst, they view a growing unofficial market as a price worth paying for a more sober society. This view is rooted in the belief that affordability is the main driver of alcohol consumption and that increasing prices by raising excise duty is therefore the single most effective way of reducing alcohol sales.

Ceteris paribus, economists would expect there to be some truth in this assertion, but there is too much real world evidence to the contrary for it to be taken as an iron rule. For example, alcohol consumption has fallen in most European countries since 1980 despite alcohol becoming significantly more affordable (OECD, 2011: 275).19 In Denmark, Sweden and Finland, the sudden drop in alcohol prices that resulted from EU accession did not bring about the kind of surge in alcohol consumption that the price elasticity models predicted.

A comparison of European countries suggests that affordability has a negligible and statistically insignificant negative effect on recorded alcohol consumption (see Figure 12). Moreover, as Figure 13 shows, when unrecorded alcohol consumption is included in the analysis, affordability does not appear to be a decisive factor in determining alcohol consumption from one country to the next.

Then there’s this long passage addressing some of the philosophy behind taxation which seems to fly in the face of much of the neo-prohibitionists propaganda playbook:

Contrary to temperance rhetoric, high alcohol taxes are not necessarily good for public health because, although excessive alcohol consumption undoubtedly carries risks to health, so too does moonshine. Counterfeit spirits and surrogate alcohol frequently contain dangerous levels of methanol, isopropanol and other chemicals which cause toxic hepatitis, blindness and death. These are the unintended consequences one associates with prohibition, albeit at a less intense level than was seen in America in the 1920s.

It should not be surprising that excessive taxation encourages the same illicit activity as prohibition since the difference is only one of degrees. As John Stuart Mill noted in 1859: ‘To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition, and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase of cost is a prohibition to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price’ (Mill, 1974: 170-171).

But in a less frequently quoted passage, Mill appears to approve of taxing alcohol to the apex of what we now call the Laffer Curve. Appreciating that governments need to raise funds and that these politicians must decide ‘what commodities the consumers can best spare’, Mill argues that taxation of stimulants ‘up to the point which produces the largest amount of revenue (supposing that the State needs all the revenue which it yields) is not only admissible, but to be approved of’ (Mill, 1974: 171).

This message tends to resonate more powerfully with politicians than Mill’s more libertarian pronouncements. Drinkers generally prefer low alcohol prices. Temperance campaigners nearly always demand higher prices. The politician, however, usually seeks to maximise tax revenues and will only react to the shadow economy when it becomes a serious threat to state finances. Nordlund and Österberg summarise the politician’s dilemma as follows:

‘Domestic economic actors can, of course, support the rules and regulations imposed by the state for controlling unrecorded alcohol consumption, but for these actors a better solution in combating unrecorded alcohol consumption would be the lowering of alcohol excise taxes… In most cases the state is not willing to follow this policy, as lower alcohol excise taxes in most cases mean lower levels of alcohol-related tax incomes. However, if the state is no longer able to control the amount of unrecorded alcohol consumption by different kinds of legal administrative restrictions the only remaining way to counteract, for instance, huge increases in travellers’ border trade with alcoholic beverages or an expansive illegal alcohol market is to lower the price difference between unrecorded and recorded alcohol by decreasing excise taxes on alcoholic beverages.’ (Nordlund, 2000: S559)

It scarcely matters to the politician whether unrecorded alcohol comes from legal or illegal sources. In either case, the treasury loses out on revenue. In Britain, HMRC estimates that the alcohol tax gap could be as much as £1.2 billion per annum, plus the costs of enforcement, and that this is largely because ‘duty rates on alcohol are far higher in the UK than in mainland Europe’ (National Audit Office, 2012: 2, 10). This is the price the state must pay for excessive taxation, but the politician is also aware that these high alcohol taxes raise £9 billion a year (Collis, 2010: 3). Being in possession of these facts he may conclude that reducing the illicit alcohol supply through tax cuts will probably reduce net alcohol tax revenues.

We argue that such a focus on maximising tax revenues is short-sighted and carries significant risks. Failing to deal with alcohol’s shadow economy threatens not only the public finances, but also public health and public order. Unrecorded alcohol has, as Nordlund and Österberg note, ‘the potential to lead to political, social and economic problems’ (Nordlund, 2000: S562). In addition to the health hazards presented by unregulated spirits, alcohol fraud in the UK is, according to the HMRC, ‘perpetrated by organised criminal gangs smuggling alcohol into the UK in large commercial quantities’ (HMRC, 2012: 8). Alcohol smuggling and counterfeiting is linked to other illegal activities, including drug smuggling, prostitution, violence, money-laundering and — in a few instances — terrorism.

Incidentally, you can download a pdf of the entire report here, and at the IEA website.

In the press release, the IEA concludes:

“The government’s focus on maximising tax revenues is short-sighted and dangerous. Aside from losing money by encouraging consumers to find cheaper illicit alternatives, public health and public order are also being put at risk by high prices. Policy-makers ought to take the threat of illicit alcohol production seriously when considering alcohol pricing in the future.”

“There is a clear relationship between the affordability of alcohol and the size of the black market. Politicians might view the illicit trade as a price worth paying for lower rates of alcohol consumption, but this research shows that the amount of drink consumed in high tax countries is exactly the same as in low tax countries.”

“Minimum alcohol pricing might seem like a quick fix to tackle problem drinking, but it is likely to cause many more problems by pushing people towards the black market in alcohol.”

While a fairly emphatic statement against higher taxes on alcohol, I assume that many will still wonder how applicable it is to the United States economy and society. Honestly, I’m sure there are differences, but the overall concept seems sound, at least to me. We can haggle over some of the details, but the idea that higher taxes isn’t always the answer just has the ring of truth to it.

My Little Pony Keg

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I love Google Images. You just never know what you’ll find and over the years I’ve found some truly odd images. And this has to be among the stranger finds. Apparently there are people obsessed with My Little Pony. I really shouldn’t be surprised, for pretty much anything you could name, people have turned their solitary obsession into a full-fledged hobby, with similar-minded people coming together from all over the globe. The internet has made this particularly easy, and I can only imagine that the sheer number of different groups, organizations, associations, clubs, etc. surrounding almost anything we could name, no matter how obscure, has exploded over the last decade. Anyway, I stumbled upon a My Little Pony imageboard — an internet forum — called Ponychan.

An entire thread titled “Alcohol Thread” began with “What is your drink of choice and why? Are you bastards even old enough to drink?” A fair question, given the only reason I am so very familiar with My Little Pony is because I have an 8-year old daughter. The thread includes images of ponies drinking beer and cider, as forum users express their favorite alcoholic drinks.

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My wife informs me — I have no idea how she knows this — that there is an entire subset of adult males who are into My Little Pony known as “Bronies.” That’s more than a little creepy.

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So here’s a few of the drinking ponies from the thread. I can only imagine the neo-prohibitionists would be going crazy if these were to see the light of day, emerging from the murky shadows of the internet. Children’s characters drinking? Oh, the horror!

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But I’ll raise toast to the ponies. Drunk ponies could only be more interesting than I remember them, having to endure their sober exploits with my daughter Alice. Thank goodness she’s moved past the little ponies, but sadly what’s she’s into now — iCarly, Victorious and the Winx Club — are hardly much better.

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How Neo-Prohibitionists Target Alcohol

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Mark Twain is generally credited with popularizing the phrase: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” He attributed it to British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, though most historians now dispute that. So even when speaking about lying, there were lies. Today’s neo-prohibitionists would be proud, lying with statistics is something they’ve finely honed into its own kind of science. If you haven’t read How To Lie With Statistics or the more recent Trust Us, We’re Experts!, they both provide great insights into just how it’s been done over the years, and continues to be done with alarming frequency.

Thanks to Jason K. for alerting me to this one, which in the news is being portrayed with the intentionally misleading How Alcohol Ads Target Kids. The story concerns a study sponsored by CAMY (the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth) — itself a bit of an anti-alcohol organization who receives funding from the king of the neo’s, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — that examined alcohol advertising in eleven magazines over a five-year period. The study itself was recently published in The Journal of Adolescent Health with the much less misleading title Risky Messages in Alcohol Advertising, 2003–2007: Results From Content Analysis.

When CAMY released a press release about the study, they re-titled it Alcohol Advertising Standards Violations Most Common in Magazines with Youthful Audiences — also not exactly accurate — and by the time it got to the media (who love alarming headlines) it became How Alcohol Ads Target Kids, which was picked up by such high profile websites as Yahoo News, Live Science and Business News Daily.

All of the news stories rely on the CAMY press release and not the study itself, which seems at least a little strange. So here’s the Abstract:

Purpose
To assess the content of alcohol advertising in youth-oriented U.S. magazines, with specific attention to subject matter pertaining to risk and sexual connotations and to youth exposure to these ads.

Methods
This study consisted of a content analysis of a census of 1,261 unique alcohol advertisements (“creatives”) recurring 2,638 times (“occurrences”) in 11 U.S. magazines with disproportionately youthful readerships between 2003 and 2007. Advertisements were assessed for content relevant to injury, overconsumption, addiction, and violations of industry guidelines (termed “risk” codes), as well as for sexism and sexual activity.

Results
During the 5-year study period, more than one-quarter of occurrences contained content pertaining to risk, sexism, or sexual activity. Problematic content was concentrated in a minority of brands, mainly beer and spirits brands. Those brands with higher youth-to-adult viewership ratios were significantly more likely to have a higher percentage of occurrences with addiction content and violations of industry guidelines. Ads with violations of industry guidelines were more likely to be found in magazines with higher youth readerships.

Conclusions
The prevalence of problematic content in magazine alcohol advertisements is concentrated in advertising for beer and spirits brands, and violations of industry guidelines and addiction content appear to increase with the size of youth readerships, suggesting that individuals aged <21 years may be more likely to see such problematic content than adults.

There’s a lot gobbledygook and psychobabble jargon in that, but happily the news reports picked up the additional information in the press release to help out those of us who can’t afford to pay to see the full article. The so-called “study” is not exactly scientific, despite the academic journal publication and pedigree, but suffers greatly from how it’s defined and how the ads were characterized — how those “risk codes” were applied. As the study was sponsored by a particular organization with an agenda, it’s hardly a surprise that the conclusions would support that agenda. After all, they bought and paid for it.

One of the premises is that the 11 magazines they examined were ones with a “substantial youth readership,” which is important since they’re claiming that alcohol companies are targeting kids and/or violating advertising standards. I’d love to know which magazines they targeted, but that information has not been made readily available, even though you’d think that with such a dire problem they’d want to warn parents which magazines not to let their impressionable young children read. Should we wonder why that is? What it really comes down to is how they define “substantial youth readership?” For the study, that meant at least 15% of the readership was estimated to be underage, which is presumably what they mean by “youth.” I think most people would be hard pressed to consider 15% of anything “substantial.” So right from the get go, the study seems flawed; unless of course your goal is to manufacture a particular conclusion.

They further claim that these ads “frequently showed alcohol being consumed in an irresponsible manner.” First of all, how you define what “irresponsible” means is at best very subjective and certainly prone to be interpreted differently by different people. One of the examples of what they mean is “showing alcohol consumption near or on bodies of water.” Since when is that the hallmark of irresponsible behavior? Beer can’t be consumed responsibly, or safely, if there’s water nearby? Seriously, WTF?

Other examples they give include “encouraging overconsumption and providing messages supportive of alcohol addiction.” But those are both so vague as to be almost meaningless, and very open to interpretation. They further suggest that “sexual connotations or sexual objectification” were seen in “nearly one in five ad occurrences.” Again, pretty vague and subjective, but beyond that, so what? Isn’t “sex sells” the number one rule of advertising? Even if true, is alcohol advertising the only group using sex to sell their product? Or is that tactic literally everywhere. I remember being shown in an advertising class during college how the word “sex” could be found in the hair of the colonel in Kentucky Friend Chicken advertising. Sex is everywhere. Shock, surprise? Hardly. It’s the reason we’re all here. If you go looking for it, you’re going to find it. And frankly, under the circumstances, finding less than 20% of the alcohol ads with sexual content seems positively rock bottom, and something that they should see as a positive, wouldn’t you think?

But despite such vagueness, CAMY is undaunted, and finds exactly what they’re looking for. CAMY director and study co-author David Jernigan makes this claim. “The bottom line here is that youth are getting hit repeatedly by ads for spirits and beer in magazines geared towards their age demographic.” He goes on. “As at least 14 studies have found that the more young people are exposed to alcohol advertising and marketing, the more likely they are to drink, or if already drinking, to drink more, this report should serve as a wake-up call to parents and everyone else concerned about the health of young people.”

But another similar study by CAMY done in 2010 found that Less Alcohol Advertising Makes No Difference. In that study — covering nearly the same period of time — they found that youth exposure to alcohol advertising in magazines fell by 48 percent, alcohol advertising placed in publications with under 21 audiences greater than 30 percent fell to almost nothing by 2008, and youth exposure in magazines with youth age 12-to-20 audience composition above 15 percent declined by 48.4 percent. So apparently with that no longer a problem, they instead turned their attention to magazines with a youth readership of less than 15%. That must be the problem. There has to be a problem, after all. Without problems, there can be no fund raising. There can be no clarion call to arms against the heathen drinkers and alcohol companies.

This is the modern era of non-profits. There always has to be a problem. Now matter how much progress their organization makes against whatever problem they believe exists — and they will crow about that progress — the problem persists ad infinitum. It has to. But this particular problem has already been disproved. In 2003, a “‘Federal Trade Commission report to Congress indicate[d] that its comprehensive investigation’ found no evidence of targeting underage consumers.” See Alcohol Ads Target Youth? for the full story. The media may call this “How Alcohol Ads Target Kids,” but I can’t help but see it as just the opposite. When you look closer, it seems to me more like “How Neo-Prohibitionists Target Alcohol.”