Smoking obviously can cut back on your life expectancy, quality of life and can spread the risk to others (second hand smoke). As a result we’ve seen since the millennium a crackdown on where smoking is allowed and more and more grotesque warnings.
There has been uptake by the community on the topic of smoking. The percentage of people who smoke has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. I believe even including the people who now vape, the percentage is lower than at the turn of the millennium.
On the other hand, alcohol consumption has really come out of the dark since the seventies in Ontario. From windowless hidey-place bars to glassy, who-has-the-best-view-while-getting-drunk bars of today.
Big wine was the first one to say that their product increased life spans. They said some mumbo-jumbo-resveratrol and, tadah, they had the suspected substance that made wine good for you. The reason they hadn’t realized it in the past had to do with mumbo-jumbo binge drinking. People had just been drinking wrong. If they just managed a drink or two a day, that would be good for them.
Big alcohol soon saw this and saw the error in their ways of promoting binge drinking. Mumbo-jumbo, tadah, suddenly studies found that 1 or 2 drinks a day of any alcohol would actually increase your life span.
That was the last decade or so. Finally big science had it’s say and slowly, tediously and methodically they said more than 1 or two drinks of alcohol per week cut down your life expectancy. And it can definitely cut down on quality of life with a number of cancers and other illnesses it can cause.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the consumption of alcohol had increased in the last couple decades, what with mumbo-jumbo studies backing them up and all. But now we know the truth.
I have seen some of the numbers and am going to cut my alcohol consumption in half. Take that big alcohol. If those of you who are annoyed with the ) @ ^^ ^ alcohol companies and also did the same, perhaps we could decrease their profits. Some could quit alcohol completely. Some might cut down less than me. But together we could affect big alcohol’s bottom line.
We could make sure every beer or serving of alcohol had a warning label. Perhaps covering ½ of the drink. We could banish alcohol to less visible spots. No windows on bars as they used to have in the province of Ontario.
But wait, some of you might say. Alcohol doesn’t have second hand smoke like cigarette smoking has.
Yes, but still some bad fights are blamed on alcohol and then there is also drinking and driving. Perhaps we should have stiffer sentencing for both of those?
If we put up a good, solid, kind of campaign against drinking we might get the numbers down against big alcohol. Like we did with big tobacco. I’m not the kind of optimist that thinks we can erase it like in prohibition, but we can get the numbers down.
Then, perhaps we can tackle vaping and marijuana consumption. It seems to take a decade or more for real science to evolve from the issues. Which means we might have good numbers about vaping now. And soon we should have some against marijuana use.
