Reading this piece from Canada’s Star Phoenix brings back memories of the past, when the antismoking epidemic went into high gear about 20 years ago.
Twenty years ago, in fact, we saw pieces just like this. Instead of being titled “To booze or not to booze?” we would read “To smoke or not to smoke?”. At the time there was a resemblance of a scientific debate at least. The tobacco industry was not yet on its knees, and many of the industry executives of the time still had enough backbone to highlight the trash science used by “public health” to damn their product. Also, “public health” and the media were much less controlled by Big Pharma. All in all, there was still some appearance of debate – although the fatal errors of believing that “it will never really happen, cigarettes are so common and the industry is so powerful” was made, along with the parochial “it will not happen HERE”, so that no serious political defence was set up against the Great Fraud.
That was then. We know the rest. Today things happen much faster, too. Yet we still we hear a lot of people out there again making the same classic errors, along with a new question: “Is alcohol next?”
That question should not even be asked. OF COURSE alcohol is next – and the “pluses and minuses” kind of articles such as the one we are linked to will quickly disappear. Why? Because “public health” has nothing to do with health – it has to do with social CONTROL and with the mano longa of the pharmaceutical multinationals, that’s why.
By the same token, science will have nothing to do with the repression of alcohol. Let us rephrase that: epidemiological junk science will have everything to do with prohibition, in the same way it had everything to do with smoking prohibition. Ridiculously small increases in statistical risk – say 20, 50% – will be painted with the colours of real dangers by the usual, dishonest health “authorities” to scare the population into submission and into approval of the bans.
So we can sit tight waiting for the prohibition to hit our town – or we can decide to act, for a change. For example, we could establish laws that prevent the creation of any law based on epidemiological trash science, effectively making multifactorial epidemiology useless to corporate interests and activists. The problem must be dealt with at the roots by taking political and executive power away from “public health” – the strong arm of the pharmaceutical industry – except in case of real epidemics and when it comes to clean water, kitchens, public toilets, and the like. That is what public health is good for, and that is what it should go back to doing.
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