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Stuff & Nonsense, Part 5

January 13, 2010 By Jay Brooks

By now, even the casual Bulletin reader has likely noticed that I’ve been following Pete Brown’s brilliant refutation of his national health service’s attack on alcohol, beginning with, Stuff & Nonsense: The UK Health Select Committee Report On Alcohol. The first four parts of Pete’s rebuke have been published over the past few days, and now part five is up.

Today’s rebuke concerns hospital admissions and the burden on the health care system, a facetious claim made on both sides of the pond. Over here, for example, an accident where one of the passengers had been drinking is often classified as an alcohol-related accident. In the UK:

In terms of official figures, what they don’t tell you is that when they are compiled, there’s a sharp difference between hospital admission and deaths that are considered wholly attributable to alcohol, and those where alcohol is a secondary or partial factor. And guess what? Only 25% of total ‘alcohol related’ hospital admissions are judged to be entirely due to alcohol.

At best, that simply misleads the statistics, making them sound more alarming than they really are. But it gets even worse, and in some ways goes beyond what American Neo-Prohibitionsts have been willing to say, at least so far.

The Report [implies] that if you drink, you are more likely to be a rapist, a child abuser, a wifebeater, a suicide, and that the fact that you drink makes you so. As Phil [Mellows] pointed out when he addressed the rape issue, this is not only inaccurate, it is astonishingly offensive to drinkers.

We’ve had groups here use images of a syringe filled with beer, equating beer with heroin, but so far as I know, they haven’t called those of us who drink rapists … yet. But they do seem to believe that virtually every societal ill can be pinned on alcohol.

But when someone does something appalling and then says, “The drink made me do it,” they are denying personal responsibility for their actions and we tend to dismiss this as a lame excuse. The Report seems to buy it 100%.

I could go on and on, but it’s best if I just suggest at this point that you go over and read part 5, Alcohol related hospital admissions — and the cost of alcohol to the NHS — are soaring. It’s the longest so far, but definitely worth your time.

If this is new to you, start with Pete Brown’s Health Select Committee Report on Alcohol. Part One (of 10) was published Sunday, Alcohol consumption in the UK is increasing. On Monday, parts two, 25% of the UK population is drinking at hazardous or harmful levels, and three, Binge drinking is increasing, were published. Tuesday saw part four: Alcohol is becoming cheaper/more affordable, and today part five, Alcohol related hospital admissions — and the cost of alcohol to the NHS — are soaring, was published online. Once again, stay tuned.

Filed Under: Editorial, Politics & Law Tagged With: Health & Beer, Prohibitionists, Statistics, UK

Stuff & Nonsense, Part 4

January 12, 2010 By Jay Brooks

If you’ve been following along from my posts the last couple of days, beginning with, Stuff & Nonsense: The UK Health Select Committee Report On Alcohol, and more specifically Pete Brown’s wonderfully telling and insightful rebuke of it all — and you should be — then I’m pleased to report that part four is now available.

Today’s rebuke is one I’d long wondered about, and it’s an argument often trotted out on our shores whenever the hue and cry goes up for more taxes on alcohol, as it inevitably and incessantly does. For me, perhaps the most annoying aspect to the neo-prohibitionist attacks is the never-ending nature of them. They’re like the psycho killer in every modern horror movie. There’s seemingly no way to make them stop. There’s no reasoning with them. They’re not susceptible to logic. California’s own version of a neo-prohibitionist Jason, state representative Jim Beall, said last year after his bill to raise beer taxes 560% was defeated. “They’ve given me a bloody nose. But I’m going to wipe it off and come back in a few weeks with something different.”

In today’s counter to the UK report’s assertion that Alcohol is becoming cheaper/more affordable, Pete leads with the following:

Well, alcohol is becoming more affordable because average household income is increasing. Alcohol is becoming more affordable because everything is becoming more affordable.

It’s my sense that’s what’s going on in the U.S., too. The “taxes haven’t been keeping pace with inflation” argument is likewise untrue for the UK.

[A]ffordability and price are being treated as the same thing — they’re not. By deliberately confusing ‘affordability’ (which is a function of rising disposable income) and price (which is a function of — well, price, but controlled chiefly by duty), you allow newspapers like the Telegraph to interpret these findings in the following syntax-strangled bullet point:

  • “69 – percentage alcohol is cheaper by than it was in 1980.”

This is a lie. Alcohol is NOT cheaper. It is already increasing by more than inflation, and in recent decades, it always has.

I’m going to have to see if that holds true here, too, though I suspect it does.

If this is new to you, start with Pete Brown’s Health Select Committee Report on Alcohol. Part One (of 10) was published yesterday, Alcohol consumption in the UK is increasing. Yesterdday, parts two, 25% of the UK population is drinking at hazardous or harmful levels, and three, Binge drinking is increasing, were published. Today, here’s part four: Alcohol is becoming cheaper/more affordable. Again, stay tuned.

Filed Under: Editorial, Politics & Law Tagged With: Prohibitionists, Statistics, UK

Stuff & Nonsense, Parts 2 & 3

January 11, 2010 By Jay Brooks

If you’ve been following along from my post yesterday, Stuff & Nonsense: The UK Health Select Committee Report On Alcohol, and more specifically Pete Brown’s wonderfully telling and insightful rebuke of it all — and you should be — then I’m happy to report that parts two and three are now available.

If this is new to you, start with Pete Brown’s Health Select Committee Report on Alcohol. Part One (of 10) was published yesterday, Alcohol consumption in the UK is increasing. Today, parts two, 25% of the UK population is drinking at hazardous or harmful levels, and three, Binge drinking is increasing, were published. Again, stay tuned.

Filed Under: Editorial, Politics & Law Tagged With: Prohibitionists, Statistics, UK

Stuff & Nonsense: The UK Health Select Committee Report On Alcohol

January 10, 2010 By Jay Brooks

The stuff and nonsense that neo-prohibitionist groups incessantly attack the unsuspecting public with to further their misguided agenda continues to heat up in Great Britain. Happily, Pete Brown is once again on the case. Last week the Parliament Health Select Committee released a report on alcohol in the UK. Surprising no one, it’s riddled with misleading statistics and statements and even outright lies. I’m continually amazed at how gullible the media is when they want to be, swallowing their nonsense wholesale and not questioning it for reasons that pass understanding. In this interminable war between drink and dry, the dry side appears willing to do nearly anything, no matter how reprehensible. I realize I’m biased, but people who enjoy alcohol are on my mind generally more reasonable about this. We recognize and freely admit that some people abuse alcohol and may be a danger to themselves and others. That’s true not just of alcohol, but virtually everything. That’s the price if living in a free society. Not everyone will act, at least all the time, with the highest ideals and best interests at heart. People are … well, people. We’re human, which means fallible, prone to stupidity and even engage in self-destructive behavior from time to time. But while rational people accept his fact, neo-prohibitionists are determined to use this minority when it comes to alcohol to extrapolate their behavior and insist it means everyone who drinks is ruining society. Every single example of individual bad behavior seems to their addled minds to prove alcohol will and does have this effect on everyone equally. And they have the statistics to support that (never mind that they themselves created those statistics). But enough of my ranting.

Pete Brown gives his critique of the overall report, pointing out basic inconsistencies and fabrications. The initial takeaway for him — and me as well, frankly — is this:

Liam Donaldson told the committee (with his usual utter disregard of any factual substantiation whatsoever) that there are “no safe limits of drinking,” and that “alcohol is virtually akin to smoking as one of the biggest public health issues we have to face in this country.”

Bollocks of course. But officially published, sanctioned, and undisputed bollocks.

And that comparison with smoking is quite deliberate. Not all the measures listed above [see original post] will come to pass, but arguably the most important line in the report is this one:

“Education, information campaigns and labelling will not directly change behaviour, but they can change attitudes and make more potent policies more acceptable.”

Smoking hasn’t been banned form British society. But consistent campaigning against smoking eventually changed social attitudes towards it. The smoking ban came in because the majority of people were in favour of it. Nobody but the ad industry minded when advertising and sponsorship were banned. Making smoking socially unacceptable was far more effective than trying to ban it outright. The anti-drink lobby have learned from this, and this report is a naked attempt to make drinking socially unacceptable.

But drinking is NOT the same as smoking. The BMA itself acknowledges the beneficial effects of moderate drinking. Nevertheless, this report seeks to persuade people to treat it the same way, and is meeting with little resistance.

Pete’s become a man obsessed, definitely making him my kind of bloke, and promises to taking apart the arguments in the report in greater detail, with charts and logic, including at least the following topics. The first of the is now up, and it’s linked below. I’ll continue to update these as they come. Regardless of where you live, these are worth your time, because it’s become increasingly obvious that the tactics used cross national orders and are used universally.

  1. “Alcohol consumption in the UK is increasing”
  2. “Binge drinking is increasing”
  3. “25% of the UK population is drinking at hazardous or harmful levels“
  4. “Alcohol is becoming cheapermore affordable”
  5. “Alcohol related hospital admissions — and the cost to the NHS — are soaring”
  6. “Alcohol abuse costs the country £55bn a year”
  7. “The best way to reduce the harmful effects of alcohol is to reduce overall consumption“
  8. “Alcohol advertising and promotion must be tightly regulated because it encourages underage drinking”
  9. “Pubs are a problem“
  10. “Binge drinking has been made much worse by 24 hour licensing”

Stay tuned.

Filed Under: Editorial, Politics & Law Tagged With: Prohibitionists, Statistics, UK

UK Neo-Prob’s Go Nuts … Again

January 3, 2010 By Jay Brooks

There’s a great post today by Pete Brown concerning more nonsense from Great Britain’s neo-prohibitionist-leaning government flacks. Yet again confirming, at least to me, his status as a kindred spirit regarding this issue, Pete begins with this understandably anger-fueled assessment of the situation. This story comes at the beginning of the year, when people are stopping to take stock of their lives, but instead “the neo-prohibitionists go completely fucking apeshit, pouncing on the moment when many moderate drinkers prove they don’t have a drink problem by taking a few weeks off the sauce, and use it to ram fear and alarm down the nations throats as never before.”

Effectively, the tortured math from the UK’s National Health Service suggests that one-and-a-half pints of lager constitutes “hazardous behavior,” even if that amount is consumed over a week’s time! Congratulations to England, they’ve finally beaten us in being completely ridiculous about drinking guidelines. Read Pete’s post, it’s brilliant stuff.

Filed Under: Beers, Editorial, Politics & Law Tagged With: Prohibitionists, UK

When All Else Fails, Blame Society

December 30, 2009 By Jay Brooks

crime-dog
Here’s another troubling development in the drive to erase alcohol from society. A study to be published next March in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research was featured in Science Daily last week based on an early view of the study online. (Thanks to Bulletin reader Pete M. for sending this to me.) That account was titled Alcohol Outlets Lead to Specific Problems Among Youth and Young Adults suggesting the issue is settled but the study’s title is a more vague: Ecological Associations of Alcohol Outlets With Underage and Young Adult Injuries. The Science Daily account is based on the study, but being unwilling to shell out the necessary doubloons for a subscription so I can read the whole thing means only the abstract is available to me, and it’s one of the least useful ones I’ve ever read, having almost no real information about the study at all. Here it is in its entirety.

Objective: This paper argues that associations between rates of 3 specific problems related to alcohol (i.e., accidents, traffic crashes, and assaults) should be differentially related to densities of alcohol outlets among underage youth and young adults based upon age-related patterns of alcohol outlet use.

Methods: Zip code-level population models assessed local and distal effects of alcohol outlets upon rates of hospital discharges for these outcomes.

Results: Densities of off-premise alcohol outlets were significantly related to injuries from accidents, assaults, and traffic crashes for both underage youth and young adults. Densities of bars were associated with more assaults and densities of restaurants were associated with more traffic crash injuries for young adults.

Conclusions: The distribution of alcohol-related injuries relative to alcohol outlets reflect patterns of alcohol outlet use.

From Science Daily’s account:

“Over the past four decades, public health researchers have come to recognize that although most drinkers safely purchase and enjoy alcohol from alcohol outlets, these places are also associated with serious alcohol-related problems among young people and adults,” said Paul J. Gruenewald, senior research scientist at the Prevention Research Center and corresponding author for the study.

“In the early studies, researchers believed associations were due to increased alcohol consumption related to higher alcohol outlet densities,” added Richard Scribner, D’Angelo Professor of Alcohol Research at the LSU School of Public Health. “However, as the research area has matured, the relations appear to be far more complex. It seems that alcohol outlets represent an important social institution within a neighborhood. As a result, their effects are not limited to merely the consequences of the sale of alcohol.”

So while admitting the problem is very complex, they nonetheless go on to leap to some pretty simple conclusions, that don’t seem at all supported by the evidence. At a minimum, their conclusions are only one of many possible reasons for the results their data seems to show, but which in no way leads to one inescapable conclusion, as they seem to think.

As my Bulletin reader Pete succinctly puts it:

It strikes me as another example of a giant leap of logic between an observed correlation and implied causation. There’s a link between, on the one hand, the residential ZIP Codes of patients of certain ages discharged from hospital for certain injuries, and on the other, the number of bars, restaurants, and liquor stores in those same ZIP Codes. Interesting, perhaps, but the real question is why?

Exactly. Why indeed?

But the truly scary bit is in their half-baked conclusions.

The key message, said both Gruenewald and Scribner, is that a neighborhood’s alcohol environment plays a role in regulating the risks that youth and young adults will be exposed to as they mature.

“From a prevention perspective, this represents an important refocusing of priorities, away from targeting the individual to targeting the community,” said Scribner. “This is hopeful because a community-based approach that addresses the over concentration of alcohol outlets in a neighborhood where youth injuries are a problem is relatively easy compared with interventions targeting each youth individually.”

So liquor stores are already subject to strict zoning in many places, will this be used to further isolate them next to the adult bookstores at the edge of towns? Won’t that just increase drunk driving?

Again, I turn to Pete’s assessment.

With no other supporting evidence, the study’s authors appear to suggest that more of these “alcohol outlets” in your neighborhood lead to more assaults, accidents, etc. They make this assertion despite the fact that the hospital data they used doesn’t say whether or not alcohol was even involved in those cases. Moreover, the ZIP Code of one’s residence is often not the ZIP Code where one purchases and consumes their alcohol; where we live and where we drink are not the same, particularly at the spatial resolution of ZIP Codes.

If they really want to explain the empirical patterns they found, I suggest the researchers look at other factors that might correlate with the geography of alcohol outlets. Check zoning ordinances, for example, and the neighborhoods in which such outlets are allowed. My guess is you’d find nearby residences populated disproportionately by less affluent households, ones who are either: (a) at more risk of being involved in an accident or assault regardless of any connection to alcohol, and/or (b) are less likely to have health insurance and thus more likely to end up in a hospital emergency room following minor altercations and accidents that would be treated on an outpatient basis in a more affluent part of town.

There are no doubt plenty of possible explanations; the quickness with which researches will jump to the conclusion that it’s the alcohol’s fault never ceases to amaze me.

Indeed, that is the mystery and the trouble, especially as this is the sort of thing that neo-prohibitionist groups, spearheaded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have been spending millions of dollars on, and not surprisingly getting the results that they want to further their agenda. There are research groups funded by the brewing industry that come to opposite conclusions, of course, but those are usually discounted or discredited for that affiliation, yet the media rarely does the same to studies like this one, not even bothering to ask about the funding or the agenda of the group. That such studies can then be published in “legitimate” science journals makes them even less likely to be questioned, even though that’s exactly what the media should be doing.

Don’t worry, it’s the not the individual person who abuses alcohol and good sense that’s at fault here, it’s the community where he lives. As a Monty Python skit once suggested, with a Bobby investigating a murder: “society’s to blame? Let’s lock them up instead.”

Filed Under: Editorial, Politics & Law Tagged With: Prohibitionists, Science

British Hypocrisy On Beer & Health

December 17, 2009 By Jay Brooks

uk
I take no pleasure, though a certain perverse comfort, in the fact that America is not alone in its hypocrisy when it comes to alcohol policy and its government heath organizations. Today in the BBC News is another example of this phenomenon. (Thanks to Pete Brown for pointing this one out.)

In a title no doubt intended to inspire fear and paranoia, Parents Giving Children Alcohol Fuels Binge Drinking, Sir Liam Donaldson, England’s chief medical officer, warned parents that “letting children taste alcohol to ready them for adulthood was ‘misguided'” and claimed “[e]vidence showed that this could lead to binge drinking in later life.” Curiously, he offered no support whatsoever for this so-called evidence apart from saying it. You’d think the reporter might have asked him for that evidence, but no. Way to probe for the story, Marty.

Donaldson also claimed, again without any support, that “[t]he science is clear – drinking, particularly at a young age, a lack of parental supervision, exposing children to drink-fueled events and failing to engage with them as they grow up are the root causes from which our country’s serious alcohol problem has developed.” The problem with that statement is that what he’s complaining about is that some parents give their children alcohol in a controlled environment, specifically NOT with a “lack of parental supervision,” etc. that he then claims is the problem. That makes it a problem that’s effectively the opposite of the one he starts out fomenting about and is indicated in the article’s headline. I should also mention that unlike most U.S. states, UK parents can legally “give their children alcohol at home from the age of five onwards.”

But, they continue, “[r]ates of teenage drunkenness are higher amongst both the children of parents who drink to excess and the children of parents who abstain completely.” So read that again. Kids drink more later in life if their parents either drink too much or not at all. That suggests that children of moderate drinkers do not, and the only way those children would know their parents are moderate drinkers if if they actually saw them drinking, something neo-prohibitionists are decidedly against.

Then again, as if forgetting that he began with the premise that parents giving their kids alcohol was the problem, he acknowledges. “Whilst parents have a greater influence on their children’s drinking patterns early on, as they grow older their friends have a greater influence. It is therefore crucial for parents to talk to their children about alcohol and its effects.” Talk, apparently, but not model responsible behavior or educate their children about alcohol.

But the upshot at the end is another opinion altogether, and one that contradicts everything that’s come before it.

Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians and chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance, said: “We know that adults who drink sensibly tend to pass these habits on and that some families choose to introduce alcohol to their children younger than 15 in a supportive environment.”

Well, if moderate drinking parents pass their responsible habits to their children — which I also believe they do — and some accomplish that by introducing alcohol to their kids successfully, then how exactly is this the problem that Dr. Donaldson seems to think it is? I tend to put my faith in the doctor who specializes in alcohol and health — Gilmore — rather than the administrator at the top, but perhaps that’s just me. I may simply be responding to the most reasonable position, and the one I happen to agree with.

So essentially, this article starts out with a bold headline and scary quotes from one of the country’s top docs, offered with no support whatsoever, and yet it turns out if you read all the way through it, that what they started out trying to scare people about isn’t even really true, settled or consistent. Of course, I learned in my college journalism classes that many readers tend to read the headline and maybe a paragraph or two, before their interest wanes and they move on. That’s why I was taught to put all the pertinent information in the early paragraphs and not leave it for a trick ending that contradicts the premise. (To be fair, I often ignore that advice, too, but not when I’m writing for a newspaper.) To me, that suggests an agenda on the part of either the author or the publisher. Surely an editor would have noticed the article wasn’t even internally consistent. But whatever the reason it was written this way, it certainly did beer or the truth no favors.

Filed Under: Editorial, Politics & Law Tagged With: Health & Beer, Prohibitionists, UK

A Heavenly Take on BrewDog’s Brouhaha

December 4, 2009 By Jay Brooks

thank-heaven
You may recall that earlier in the week I wrote about British beer writer Roger Protz and his remarks regarding BrewDog’s Tactical Nuclear Penguin. I don’t believe I was alone in thinking his observations were not the highlight of a long, distinguished career. I just read the response of Thank Heaven for Beer, and Mike’s take, in a post entitled Roger Protz Gets it Wrong: An Argument of Assumptions and Insult is nothing short of brilliant. Based on its length and the passion of his arguments, I have to count Mike as a kindred spirit. Well done.

Filed Under: Breweries, Editorial Tagged With: Prohibitionists

Inventing Binge Drinking

November 30, 2009 By Jay Brooks

drunk
I’ve long railed against the various governmental health department definitions of “binge drinking” as being out of touch with reality and self-serving to anti-alcohol groups. In the U.S., the CDC defines binge drinking as “five drinks in a row” and in the UK it’s too many “units of alcohol” in a given day (or number of hours). But that wasn’t always how it was defined.

In a recent issue of the Social History of Medicine, an Oxford Journal, social scientists Virginia Berridge, Rachel Herring and Betsy Thom published Binge Drinking: A Confused Concept and its Contemporary History.

Here’s the summary of the article:

Binge drinking is a matter of current social, political and media concern. It has a longterm, but also a recent, history. This paper discusses the contemporary history of the concept of binge drinking. In recent years there have been significant changes in how binge drinking is defined and conceptualised. Going on a ‘binge’ used to mean an extended period (days) of heavy drinking, while now it generally refers to a single drinking session leading to intoxication. We argue that the definitional change is related to the shifts in the focus of alcohol policy and alcohol science, in particular in the last two decades, and also in the role of the dominant interest groups.

To me, one of the key points of this article is how the definition has changed to create a panic of increasing binge drinkers when it’s far more likely rates are roughly the same, only the definition has changed so that it not only seems like the problem has grown worse, but so that anti-alcohol advocates have a convenient new method by which they can base ever more draconian policy demands.

Binge drinking as a concept has a distant history: but it also has a recent one. The term has come in recent years to describe two quite distinct phenomena. First, it is used to describe a pattern of drinking that occurs over an extended period (usually several days) set aside for the purpose. This is the ‘classic’ definition, linked to clinical definitions of the disease of alcoholism, as in Jellinek’s 1960 classification. Secondly, binge drinking has come to be used to describe a single drinking session leading to intoxication, often measured as the consumption of more than a specific number of drinks on one occasion, often by young people. There is no consensus on how many drinks constitutes this version of binge drinking—how much alcohol—and a variety of ‘cut-offs’ are used.

The second meaning has become prominent in recent years, is used extensively in research and informs UK policy. The ‘new’ definition has largely, but by no means entirely replaced the ‘classic’ definition, and both terms co-exist, if somewhat uneasily at times, in the alcohol field. Thus, it was evident from our research that there has been a shift in recent history in the meaning of the term. What was less clear was how the current confused definition of binge drinking has come to hold sway in public and policy discussions when it seems to be different from definitions which operated in the past. This is an issue which has implications for policy. But it is also a change which throws light on the relationship between science and policy. Our overall hypothesis, which is set out in this discussion paper, is that the definitional change must be related to the shifts in the focus of alcohol policy and alcohol science, in particular in the last two decades, and also to the role of the dominant interest groups in the alcohol field. It is not a change simply in the types of people drinking and the ways in which they drink, but rather an issue of perception which tells us something about the ways in which science and policy interact. [My emphasis.]

And the perception, as well as the target, has indeed changed. While binge drinkers used to be thought of as solitary older males, today the binge drinking “focus is on women and young people.” Although they’re careful in the wording of the article, I think it’s clear they’re saying that the shift in defining binging has been a bad idea, as it’s taken the focus away from the people who really need help and placed it on a more convenient target that allows neo-prohibitionist groups to sound the alarm about the problems of underage drinking — the children, always the children. People naturally want to protect kids from harm, and so it’s much easier to advance destructive alcohol policy under the rubric of underage drinking issues. I’d argue that this is even likely the reason for the shift in the definition, to advance the anti-alcohol agenda more effectively. Fear is always more effective than truth, sadly, in motivating people.

Among the journal article’s conclusions:

Policy makers should be aware of the context in which they operate. Concepts do not appear out of thin air, but have their own history. This study can in fact be seen as feeding in ‘evidence’ to policy on the rational model. On a more theoretical level, this change of definitions over time is also a case study of evidence and policy itself. It tells us how science interacts with policy making and the policy environment.

Exactly. In this case, the science was manipulated and created to further a specific anti-alcohol agenda over the last two decades. As a result, everyone I know is a binge drinker. That’s what happens when science no longer reflects reality but instead is used to remake it.

Filed Under: Beers, Editorial, Politics & Law Tagged With: Health & Beer, Prohibitionists

A Clockwork Orange Approach To Alcoholism

November 25, 2009 By Jay Brooks

clockwork-orange
This is a strange one, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, though my natural skeptical tendencies run toward worry. As reported in the USA Today last week in an article entitled Kudzu Compound Could Help Alcoholics Quit Drinking, “[a]n ingredient derived from the [Kudzu] vine noted for gobbling up native Southeast landscapes could help treat alcoholism.

kudzu

Essentially the plant Kudzu, a vine that’s a native of Japan, later introduced in the U.S. and growing wild throughout the southeast, has been found to have a substance contained in it, daidzin, which researchers believe may help in the treatment of alcoholism. The article is based on a study published in the November issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research under the title Suppression of Heavy Drinking and Alcohol Seeking by a Selective ALDH-2 Inhibitor.

But here’s the odd bit, at least for me. The Daidzin found in Kudzu (and which the scientists now believe they can synthesize) makes “drinking alcohol an unpleasant experience.” Isn’t that how they treated the violent kids in Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange? In the novel (and film by Stanley Kubrick) the protagonist undergoes “a form of aversion therapy, in which Alex is given a drug that induces extreme nausea while being forced to watch graphically violent films for two weeks.”

Apparently using Kudzu in this manner is an ancient Chinese folk remedy, thousands of years old. To learn more about it, check out The Amazing Story of Kudzu. The addiction community seems interested. “The results seem promising, says Raye Litten, co-leader of the medications development team at the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. ”

But I can’t help thinking that’s still not the right way to treat addiction. I suppose if it’s reserved for the very extreme cases or is done voluntarily, but still I worry. Remember when fluoride was added to the drinking water? Sure, dentists are convinced it helps prevent cavities, but not everyone is so sure, and even today there are people who don’t believe it. (Doc, this would be a good place for you to chime in.) My mother — a nurse — and countless other parents complained and protested when they added it to the school water fountains in the mid-to-late 1960s. What’s to stop certain groups from trying to add this to the water to stop all people from drinking alcohol? Sure I sound paranoid, but it sure would make a good action/adventure flick, don’t you think?

Filed Under: Editorial, News, Politics & Law Tagged With: Alcoholism, Prohibitionists

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