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The Dishonesty Of The Prohibitionist Fundamentalists

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Having been involved at some level professionally in the beer industry for over twenty years, I’ve been growing increasingly weary of the anti-alcohol organizations incessantly nipping at the heels of the brewing community. In my lifetime, they’ve grown increasingly dishonest in their rhetoric and their strategies to punish or rid the country of alcohol. For years, I’ve been referring to them as neo-prohibitionists, to separate them from the first wave of temperance advocates that resulted in the failed experiment that was prohibition. No more. The way I see it, they’ve become as inflexible and divisive as they were before 1919, so they’re just prohibitionists from now on. And the increasing polarization of their arguments, no longer admitting any positives for alcohol, a position that’s only been happening in recent years, seems eerily similar to the way the temperance movement of the 19th century migrated from fairly liberal to incredibly all-encompassing, so that by the end they wanted to ban everything, not just all alcohol, but also coffee, sugar, salt and many other things they didn’t like. Today’s prohibitionists seem every bit as fundamentalist as their earlier incarnations, reacting to the modern world in much the same way, becoming increasingly unable to compromise, or even see the other side’s point of view. Many seem like wild-eyed fanatics, with no sense of proportion or concern for anything beyond furthering their agenda.

What got my ire up yet again was a tweet yesterday from Alcohol Justice, the self-proclaimed sheriff of another prohibition, claiming that “Doubling alcohol tax would reduce alcohol-related mortality 35%, sexually transmitted disease 6%, crime 1.4%.” The tweet also included a link to one of their propaganda screeds, While Beer Taxes Slide, Industry Profits & Public Health Suffers. It was originally written in June, but it’s a fairly common tactic to retweet the same propaganda with different headlines or scary statistics. That article was responding to a June 11 post on CNN Money’s blog, Every state imposes a tax on beer, but the amount each state charges varies widely. That’s not exactly news, since the reason for this has to do with the alcohol laws being made by each state after prohibition ended. What would be more surprising if all the states’ alcohol laws were the same. But each time this is discussed, they make it sound like some states are cheating somebody, like there’s something wrong with the amount, especially if it’s lower than they’d like, though to be fair they’re all too low, from their point of view. But for every state, there’s a reason why they are whatever amount they are that’s evolved from 1933 to the present. It didn’t just happen, there’s context, which the prohibitionist routinely ignore.

But right in the very first sentence of While Beer Taxes Slide, Industry Profits & Public Health Suffers, Alcohol Justice states something that’s not true when they write that “Tennessee, which currently levies the highest rate [of excise tax on beer] (at $0.06 a beer, not exactly breaking anyone’s bank).” Tennessee’s tax is $0.66 on a six-pack, which is 11-cents a beer, not six. So whether you think that’s too low or too high, right out of the gate they’re being dishonest.

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Of course, taxes in beer are already quite a large percentage of the total cost, and because few other consumer goods include an excise tax, they’re one of the most heavily taxed items you can buy.

They then launch into their tired argument that those excise taxes simply aren’t covering the supposed “harm” that they insist alcohol is causing. It’s an incredibly spurious argument, but they keep on making it anyway. They cite a $94 billion annual amount for this “harm,” which comes from a 2006 study, Economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption in the U.S.. In that study they cite, the cause of all the strife is caused by “Excessive alcohol consumption,” not the regular, moderate consumption that most people, maybe 95% of people engage in. But even assuming that their figure for the “economic costs of excessive drinking” were even close to accurate (which they’re not) they should not be used as a basis to punish all adult drinkers.

In just one example, the $161.4 billion (72.2% of $223.5 billion) they ascribe to “lost wages” does not balance any lost productivity with people hired to replace those who miss work, either temporarily or as a permanent replacement. Sure it sucks for the person who lost their job, but the work goes on, and somebody will do it, making a positive contribution to the economy that’s utterly ignored by that statistic, making it completely dishonest, especially considering they claim it’s nearly three-quarters of the harm done by alcohol. I wrote more about this specific study a couple of years ago, in Societal Costs vs. Personal Costs For Alcohol, if you want to dig deeper into its inaccuracies.

This same sort of nonsense popped up again in England, which I detailed recently in Making Up Harms. In that instance, an organization there claimed that £21 billion of harm was caused by alcohol. My colleague, Pete Brown, responded appropriately, telling them that “overstating problem creates moral panic and media sensationalism that helps no one.” A European health organization took a look at that number months before and concluded that “social cost of drinking totals little better than nonsense.” That wisdom comes from an article by Finnish researcher Klaus Mäkelä, published in Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, which concludes:

This analysis argues that estimates of the cost imposed on society by drinking are often grossly inflated because (among other things) they assume that hazardous drinking must be irrational consumption, that crime benefits no one, that drinking has no social, psychological or indirect business benefits, and that productivity losses are not counter-balanced by benefits elsewhere and by non-alcohol impaired workers taking over the jobs of the impaired. These assumptions are, it is contended, based on value judgements sometimes not made explicit, and lend the results of calculations based on those values a spurious appearance of objectivity and precision.

And that study also concludes that “[e]ven the most sophisticated cost-of-alcohol calculations include entries based on misleading assumptions or logical mistakes.”

Next, Alcohol Justice goes back on the attack. “The alcohol industry’s go-to trope — that beer taxes are regressive and harm the middle class — is simply false.” Talk about a straw man. That’s not even the “trope,” we’re losing our middle class at an alarming rate. Higher taxes, any higher taxes on consumer goods, really, are regressive because they more greatly effect the poor. And did it occur to no one that they drink less than the more affluent precisely because they have less disposable income? Way to throw salt in the wound. But beyond that, their “evidence” is that “one-third of Americans don’t even drink alcohol,” based on a Gallup poll. So let me see if I have this straight. Some people don’t buy beer, so therefore more taxes are not regressive. Okay, got it. They do correctly say that “those who drink the most will pay the most in alcohol taxes,” but given that the majority of those people will undoubtedly do so responsibly and not cost society one thin dime, then how is this a reasonable argument for raising taxes?

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They based their overall argument on the idea that rising excise taxes on alcohol will “save lives,” based on yet another study, Effects of alcohol tax and price policies on morbidity and mortality: a systematic review, conducted at the University of Florida. It was really a meta-study, looking at other similar studies. They identified “162 papers [that] have been published that evaluate the effects of alcohol tax and price levels on alcohol sales, drinking, and a range of alcohol-related morbidity and mortality outcomes,” but they used only 112 of those to draw their conclusions. Why fifty of these studies were ignored, I can only guess.

But what they did was simply search a series of databases looking for the following words: “(tax OR taxes OR taxation OR cost OR cost* OR price OR prices) AND (alcohol* OR drinking OR liquor OR drunk* OR beer OR wine OR spirits OR malt beverage*)” Any articles they found containing those terms were identified and classified. I don’t doubt the scientific rigors of the methodology, but I question many of the assumptions underlying them. There are undoubtedly plenty of studies looking for a correlation for taxing and consumption, most done I’d warrant to justify themselves or an agenda. So that’s what you’ll find in the literature. Are there many (or any?) studies done looking for an opposite conclusion, looking for instances of higher taxes having a different outcome? Essentially, this is just a circle jerk. You have a self-fulfilling prophecy of studies trying to prove causation being used to create another study showing that higher taxes reduce so-called alcohol “harms,” but with no dissent or opposing views it’s just a circle of agendas reinforcing themselves in a closed loop.

In their conclusions, they suggest that “[i]n most developed countries, alcohol is second only to tobacco as a consumer product that causes death (approximately 85 000 alcohol-related deaths per year in the United States alone)” but their evidence for that is Actual causes of death in the United States, 2000, which lists alcohol third, after tobacco and poor diet and physical inactivity. And even at number three, alcohol is less than a quarter of deaths attributed to poor diet and physical inactivity and only 10.6% of the top two. So even assuming their calculations are correct (they’re most likely not) it’s still far less than that of other health issues people face. But even though they don’t explicitly say it’s number two in the U.S., that’s the clear message of that statement, which certainly suggests a willingness to mislead or mis-state information. But the kicker is in the acknowledgements, which thanks the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) for their support and funding of the study. The RWJF is the mother of all prohibitionist groups, and they in turn fund many of the other anti-alcohol groups in the country, as well as many of the studies these groups use to peddle their agenda. See what I mean? Circle jerk.

But more generally the idea that they can show a direct cause and effect of crime, health care costs and other factors in a straight line from alcohol to a burden on society that would not exist without the booze is laughably simple and almost naive.

The media seems to fall for these studies, presumably because they’re published in “scientific journals” and because the prohibitionist groups putting out press releases about them claim the moral high ground. They also frame themselves in terms of protecting people, or children, or society from the scourge of big business, or big alcohol, or whatever bogeyman label they can come up with. What I find so reprehensible about that is how hypocritical that is. They usually claim that the alcohol companies are just out to make money, while by contrast they’re just trying to protect people. But when they use deceit and falsehoods in their efforts to “protect” how can they continue to cling to that moral high ground? Even if they believe in what they’re doing or saying (a doubtful premise), lying for a good cause is still just lying. Can the ends really justify the means under such circumstances?

Follow their rhetoric for long enough, and it starts to seem like they really believe that the beer companies would do anything to make a buck, as if there really aren’t people behind these companies. I know many wonderful people who work in the beer world, for both small and large companies. The vast majority have families, pay their taxes and work hard, and share many of the same values as prohibitionists. Yet these fundamentalists seem to believe that these companies really don’t care about their customers, that they don’t care about drunk drivers or alcoholics. It just pisses me off. Do they really think a beer distributor sales rep. is more concerned with their job than whether their child is hurt in a car accident with a drunk driver. They always accuse the beer companies of not really doing enough to encourage responsible drinking. But whatever they do, it’s never enough to the fundamentalists. It’s simple, really. Fanaticism is never satiated. You can’t appease it.

Is alcohol perfect? Can everyone use it responsibly? Of course not. Most beer drinkers would be the first to admit that. But unlike the prohibitionist fundamentalists, we’re willing, and able, to concede that it’s not for everyone. Not everyone can handle the enjoyment that beer can bring. We’re willing to work on fixing any problems that some have with alcohol, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because we don’t like problem drinkers either. I hate a bad drunk as much as the average MADD member, but I don’t think we should throw the baby out with the bathtub gin. But prohibitionists use every story where an individual acted stupidly and recklessly to suggest that it’s the inevitable, and only, result of drinking. They literally ignore the absolute majority of responsible drinkers, as if they don’t even exist.

That’s because these groups, in my opinion, really don’t care about health policy or public policy. They care about pushing an agenda. That agenda is punishing the alcohol industry and making it as hard as possible for them to do business. Since prohibition ended, the work of the prohibitionists has continued unabated, in an effort to severely limit their ability to advertise, to limit the scope of who can buy alcohol, and where, at what times, even in what neighborhoods. Anything they can do to cripple or harm alcohol is something they’ll try.

If they really cared about stopping drunk driving, they’d lobby Congress to invest in more mass transit infrastructure so people didn’t have to drive and help fund the research and development efforts to create cars that drive themselves, which would eradicate drunk driving at a stroke. If they really believed these corporations were evil, they’d work on reforming corporations. Because much of what they accuse big alcohol of is trying to make a buck by any means. But corporate charters demand that profit be their prime directive. Doing otherwise would be against their charters. People running corporations have a duty to their shareholders to maximize profits. It’s their jobs. I don’t like the way many big corporations operate, and I think corporate reform is likely the only way to change their behavior, but I’ve never once heard that argument from a prohibitionist group wanting alcohol companies to act differently.

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You may recall that earlier this year, prohibitionist groups revealed themselves as having no less a profit motive than most corporations. In The Neo-Prohibitionist Agenda: Punishment Or Profit, we discovered their true motives, that 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 in terms of being non-profit charities, many aren’t even good examples of that, to wit: MADD Charity Rating Downgraded To “D.”

Toward the end of the Alcohol Justice propaganda screed, they finally get to the numbers from their tweet. “Alcohol taxes are the single most effective policy to reduce alcohol-related harm. Raising taxes significantly reduces consumption, particularly among underage youth. Doubling the alcohol tax would reduce alcohol-related mortality by 35%; traffic crash deaths by 11%; sexually transmitted disease by 6%; and crime by 1.4%.” Those numbers are the spurious conclusions drawn from the meta-study examining studies looking for support for raising taxes. But that first declarative statement, “Alcohol taxes are the single most effective policy to reduce alcohol-related harm,” really stands out. Oh, to be so sure about anything. I want to live in that idyllic world. Unfortunately, I live in the real world, where everything is complicated, hopelessly interconnected and where few things are as simple as prohibitionists would have us believe. Late last year, I wrote that Higher Alcohol Taxes Reduce Tax Revenue, in which government studies from abroad showed the polar opposite of what AJ claims is the “the single most effective policy to reduce alcohol-related harm,” showing in fact that “affordability has a negligible and statistically insignificant negative effect on recorded alcohol consumption.” Similarly, in 2010, a European Study Shows Raising Beer Taxes A Bad Idea.

At the very end, talking about one state’s recent decision to reduce their excise tax on beer, they say this. “Meanwhile, as consumption rises, so will alcohol-related harm and its associated costs in the state.” Um, consumption of alcohol around the world has been dropping, and even in the U.S. it peaked in the early 1980s, and has been slowly, but steadily, falling ever since.

I really feel like I’m tilting at windmills, although the prohibitionists seem like the bat-shit crazy Don Quixote who sees dragons and damsels in distress everywhere he looks. They keep making the same arguments, ones that are riddled with holes, seemingly oblivious — though more likely maliciously deceitful — to how most people actually enjoy their alcohol or how the overwhelming majority of breweries are small family-owned businesses with deep roots in their local communities.

But perhaps the biggest charade in all of this is how one-sided their arguments have become. Admitting not one positive effect for alcohol, their list of harms is so widely unbalanced that it’s utterly meaningless. A couple of years ago, I started a post (but never finished it) about a then-still-Marin Institute report in which they abruptly shifted their focus from “we’re not neo-prohibitionists” to saying this. “Alcohol consumption, even at moderate levels, is responsible for a wide range of health problems, from heart disease, to various forms of cancer, to sexually-transmitted diseases.” That’s ignoring a lot of science, and that’s the moment, for me, when they veered straight into the fast lane of prohibitionist fundamentalism. Because you’d have to be a fairly committed prohibition fundamentalist to ignore the numerous studies that show a positive total mortality rate for drinkers, that is people who drink moderately tend to live longer than those who abstain, and even heavy drinkers usually outlive teetotalers. Then there’s the countless smaller studies showing small advantages from drinking beer that keep people from getting certain diseases or otherwise positively effecting their overall health. Anyone paying attention would have to notice that in recent years, now that people are shedding their prejudices and looking at alcohol with a less jaundiced eye, that they’re finding all kinds of solid evidence and support that alcohol is not entirely the demon it was once thought to be.

That’s not even counting the calming effect of a drink after work or a beer with dinner, a reward for getting through the day, and one which so improves one’s mental state. Plus there’s the many other ways that beer enhances our lives. Several years ago, I recall something Lew Bryson wrote, Why We Drink, in response to a comment an anonymous person left on his blog who was seemingly (though more likely he was not) confused as to why anyone would ever want to drink alcohol. In his response, Lew detailed many of the intangible reasons that people enjoy beer in their lives. You no doubt know what those are.

That none of these tangible and intangible positive attributes to moderate and responsible drinking are taken into account when these so-called studies seek to put a price tag on harms they claim are caused by alcohol (and importantly, not by the people drinking, but the alcohol itself bearing responsibility), I believe, speaks volumes about what’s really going on with prohibitionist fundamentalism. Because as far as I can tell, the only way their arguments can continue to be even made, is if they continue to utterly ignore anything and everything that contradicts them. So they essentially simply discount and dismiss whatever doesn’t fit their view of the world, where everything is still black and white, and alcohol is responsible for everything wrong with modern society.

But we live in a technicolor world, with vibrant hues and shades of both meaning and experience. And for most of us, beer is a welcome part of that world, in which it enhances our lives and makes us enjoy ourselves just a little bit more. Is that something worthwhile that should be protected, celebrated and enjoyed? Yes, yes it is. Drink a toast tonight with your friends and family to the fact that you still have the right to drink a toast tonight with your friends and family. If the prohibitionist fundamentalists have their way, we may not be able to enjoy that experience. Stand up to their dishonesty and their hypocrisy. Say it with me. “I am a beer drinker.”

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.

Sweden Forbids Lust

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sweden
I tend to think that the U.S. has a lock on the provincial, puritanical thinking that forbids so many odd features of everyday life, often anything to do with sex, while at the same time allowing violence with nary a sideways glance. I’ve never understood that, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, apparently Sweden is similarly off the deep end on sex, something I would never have expected. A Danish brewer, Amager Bryghus, created a series of seven beers based on the seven deadly sins, with a different beer, and label, for each. They call them the Sinners Series.

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Take a look at the seven labels below and see if you can guess which one Sweden decided had to be censored?

If you answered Lust, you’re correct. Here’s what the label looks like outside of Sweden.

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And here’s what it looks like inside Sweden.

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According to The Local, an English-language news website covering Sweden, the problem was that “Danish beer bottles ‘too sexy’ for Sweden.” Like some U.S. states and Canadian provinces, Sweden has government-run liquor stores, and they make the decisions as to what’s acceptable.

Sweden’s state-run liquor retailer has decided that the picture on the Lust bottle, which contains a sweet Belgian ale with a 9.2 percent alcohol content, doesn’t abide by Sweden’s alcohol etiquette.

“We can’t accept the label, it’s against Sweden’s alcohol laws,” Systembolaget spokesman Lennart Agén told The Local.

“It’s quite a sexual label.”

As a result, Systembolaget has told the brewers to remove or edit the picture if the beer is to be sold in Sweden. The brewers responded by simply blacking out the entire label so neither the woman nor the bath is visible at all.

But it wasn’t an easy process, according to the brewers.

“We had to go through ten attempts before they’d accept it,” Henrik Papsø, head of communications at the brewery, told The Local.

Still, it seems awfully weird that a cartoon woman that’s only suggestive at best tripped up the censors. And I though we were prudes.

Amager-lust

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.

parents-drinking-1

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.