Are Christians doing the bidding of large, multinational breweries and distilleries as they vote for stricter laws and control over the sale of alcohol in their states?

That is what John Ellis asserts in this article at PJ Media.

"I would argue that alcohol consumption is the biggest risk differential in this election."

Scott Adams wrote yesterday about risk assessment regarding the two candidates for president.

this election features a candidate who is known to like her alcohol versus a candidate who has reportedly never had a drink, an illegal drug, or a cigarette. And that means alcohol can be considered in the risk assessment.

I would argue that alcohol consumption is the biggest risk differential in this election. We’re just blind to that risk because alcohol is socially acceptable. But even in your own life, you see alcohol being the force behind unwanted pregnancies, drunk driving, bar fights, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and just about every bad decision you’ve ever made. If we humans were even a little bit objective we would never select a leader who is likely to be impaired by alcohol several hours per week, including the workday. (Allegedly.)

Go here to see how he ranks other risk factors.

Late night delivery of alcoholic beverages

Megan Hanney reports at TechCrunch,

Never before has Europe seen an app dedicated to the late-night delivery of alcoholic beverages until the launch of Bevy, one of London’s emerging tech startups. With operations running until 5 a.m., plans to become a 24/7 business and a model ready for rapid scale, Bevy is redefining on-demand services through increased access to liquor.

Designed for ultimate convenience, the app is built with GPS technology for tracking deliveries and offers a zero minimum spend along with a wait time of only 30 minutes. Appealing to those enjoying nightlife, Bevy additionally delivers mixers, tobacco, vape products and condoms.

Read more here.

Will drinking alcohol help you live longer?

Remember the news stories a while back that said moderate drinking of alcohol is beneficial and perhaps life-extending? Those claims have now been rebuffed by researchers at the University of Victoria's Centre for Addictions Research in British Columbia. Jessica Firger reports in Newsweek,

Overall, the review of the data suggests that it was occasional drinkers (categorized as less than one drink per week) who actually lived longest and enjoyed the most robust health. Most likely, this isn’t because a touch of booze is an elixir of life, but rather because the amount of alcohol is too negligible to have effects—bad or good.

Read more about the research here.

An excess of certainties is balanced by a deficit of wisdom

At National Review James Lileks takes off with brilliant wit on a Vox piece by Dylan Matthews. Matthews wants higher taxes on sugar, tobacco, and alcohol, gun control, and a ban on human drivers. Lileks writes,

Never mind the line about guns. Again, tell me something new. It’s the penultimate demand that’s the most revealing. “I want to ban human drivers ASAP.” This does not stand for “A Silly Asinine Proposal.” It’s a sign of the new enlightened man, who has identified — correctly — the interior of the automobile as the last place where one can go about one’s business and do what one wishes. Right now there is a man in a large car who is smoking a cigarette and drinking a Coke, and possibly listening to a talk-radio show that’s ginning up the Benghazi Hoax for the 600th day. We can tax the jeebus out of the items he ingests, but he’ll still have that big car, which (1) will make the oceans rise like the gorge of a New York Times reporter sent to cover NASCAR for the Style section, and (2) allows the driver to live anywhere he wants and go where he pleases.

So we must ban human drivers. We need to do it ASAP. Once we have the technology, and self-driving cars are available, Wham! Down comes another tranche of glorious laws to forbid people from manipulating their own possessions in a manner that suits them. This would require everyone to sell their cars, I guess, except no one would buy them. So the state would buy them from you, perhaps, and give you a voucher to buy a little Google put-put that does 50 mph, unless the U.N.’s daily Carbon Report decides that India belched out a bit too much CO2 yesterday, and everyone has to do 42 mph between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m., after which you can wind ’er up to 45 mph, if you don’t mind your cheeks rippling from G-forces.

Would the ban be for cities only, or for everyone? Would rural North Dakotans have to trade in their pick-ups for dinky bugs, or be required to retrofit their old trusty Chevys for self-driving units? Oh, what a madcap movie someone could make about the gubmint man who has to go to Elk Groin, Mont., and tell the lads down at the garage that they can’t drive their trucks anymore. Let me give you a web address with information about the new laws, fellas, and you can see how it’s just win-win for everybody. Amused at first, the locals decide to humor the fellow, and show him all the quirky joys of small-town life, and he becomes enchanted by a free-spirited woman who raises horses and drives big trucks, and takes him for a wild midnight ride where speeds exceed the legal limit. He goes back to the regional office, a changed man, his heart full of newfound admiration for the ways of these independent people and their curious, outmoded, backwards attachment to “shifting” and “steering” and all those old folkways. He starts to write a report about how the ban shouldn’t be applied to these people, but then shrugs and realizes he has a job review coming up, so he sends the IRS a memo: “You might want to audit all these people.”

Read more here.

Drinking is healthy?

Addiction/public health specialist Dr. Stanton Peele says we have an "addiction phobia" in America. Well, yeah, I guess I do. I try very hard to stay away from any addictions. Dr. Peele is constantly writing about how drinking alcohol in moderation is good for you and abstinence from alcohol is associated with earlier mortality. He also writes about:

significantly reduced risks of cognitive loss or dementia in moderate, nonbinge consumers of alcohol.

And alcohol conveys health benefits. If you cannot drink (or believe that you cannot), you probably increase your likelihood of early death. If so, I am truly sorry for you.

Read more here.

While Dr. Peele constantly writes about this subject, I have never seen him offer a theory as to why drinking alcohol is so beneficial. What is there about the alcohol that makes it so healthy for us?

So I decided to Google "Why is drinking alcohol in moderation good for us?" One of the first articles to come up was this one by David Hanson Ph.D.:

Some writers have been arguing that wine drinkers tend to be healthier than others because they generally have better health habits, not because they consume alcohol.

It’s true that wine drinkers tend to have better health habits than many others do. However, that can’t explain away the established medical fact that the moderate consumption of beer, wine or distilled spirits improves health and longevity. Both beer and liquor tend to confer the same health benefits as red wine; the benefit is found in the alcohol rather than in a specific beverage.

Alcohol reduces heart attacks, ichemic strokes and circulatory problems through a number of identified ways. They include:

Improving blood lipid profile by increasing HDL (“good”) cholesterol and decreasing LDL (“bad”) cholesterol.
Decreasing thrombosis (blood clotting) by reducing platelet aggregation, reducing fibrinogen (a blood clotter) and increasing fibrinolysis (the process by which clots dissolve).
Other ways such as increasing coronary blood flow, reducing blood pressure, and reducing blood insulin level.

The moderate consumption of alcohol appears to be more effective than most other lifestyle changes that are used to lower the risk of heart and other diseases. For example, the average person would need to follow a very strict low-fat diet, exercise vigorously on a regular basis, eliminate salt from the diet, lose a substantial amount of weight, and probably begin medication in order to lower cholesterol by 30 points or blood pressure by 20 points.

But medical research suggests that alcohol can have a greater impact on heart disease than even these hard-won reductions in cholesterol levels or blood pressure. Only cessation of smoking is more effective. Additionally, other medical research suggests that adding alcohol to a healthful diet is more effective than just following the diet alone.

After reviewing the research on heart diseases and stroke, Dr. David Whitten reported that "we don't have any drugs that are as good as alcohol” and noted investigator Dr. Curtis Ellison asserted that "abstinence from alcohol is a major risk factor for coronary heart disease."

The moderate consumption of alcohol appears to be beneficial in reducing or preventing even more diseases and health problems including angina pectoris bone fractures and osteoporosis, diabetes, digestive ailments, duodenal ulcer, erectile dysfunction (ED), essential tremors, gallstones, hearing loss, hepatitis A, kidney stones, liver disease, macular degeneration (a major cause of blindness), pancreatic cancer, Parkinson’s disease, poor cognition and memory, poor physical condition in elderly, rheumatoid arthritis, stress and depression, and type B gastritis.

It’s not surprising that the science-based Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid recommends the regular moderate consumption of alcohol (beer, wine, or spirits) unless contraindicated.

It’s clear that the moderate consumption of alcohol improves health and increases longevity.

Read more here.

Alcohol-fueled sexual assault

One of my favorite writers is Ben Stein. Last week he chose to weigh in on alcohol and sexual assault on our college campuses:

But excessive drinking is not required to be young or to enjoy life. It is possible to have a great life without any alcohol at all in one’s veins.

I have been in the recovery community for almost 30 years now. I am far from being a young person but I see and talk to a great number of young people in recovery. I hear them talk about how miserable their lives were when they were ruled by alcohol and how happy they are that their lives are free from booze.

I see genuine miracles in the lives of college kids who substitute meditation, exercise, travel, and a carefully, patiently cultivated romance for drunken hookups.

It occurs to me that it would be enormously useful for schools to encourage students to leave alcohol out of their lives if they cannot act responsibly while under the influence. It would be a great day when the cool kids on campus were more interested in sobriety than in losing their minds and souls under the influence of beer and liquor. Sometimes, this will be accomplished by turning to a superhuman power, which is how by far the best program for sobriety, AA, does it. Perhaps sometimes it can happen in other ways. Obviously, public schools should not force any special religion on anyone. Just as obviously if inmates are encouraged to pray in federal and state prisons, it is insane to keep young people in school from prayer. Prayer works and prayer works wonders. We have strayed far too much away from it in the postwar era. Perhaps getting back to it through the recovery world will work miracles in the nation as a whole.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Alcohol changes people, especially young people, in ways that can be devastating. If the country is going to respond intelligently to sexual assault on campus, intelligent and restrained approaches to the use of alcohol, the absolute condemnation of binge drinking and idealizing blackouts is essential.

And let’s be specific: The beer companies that make drinking look so glamorous are creating a massive cost in the wreckage of lives. They make money from it and they do not pay for it. It would be a good idea if the de-romanticizing of alcohol on campus started with them. They won’t like it.

But it’s got to start somewhere.

And if we refuse to admit prayer and a higher power into our lives in the struggle against alcohol fueled sexual assault, we are shutting the door on safety, decency towards women, and health.

Read more here.

Legal marijuana use means more marijuana use, and more marijuana use means above all more teen marijuana use.

David Frum writes,

The 50 states are sometimes called “laboratories of democracy.” Although the expression is intended to highlight in flattering terms how innovative they can be, it also suggests that the states’ political experiments can and do fail. In the event of failure, the hope must be that damage can be stopped at the state line. Today, the experiment of state-by-state marijuana legalization is failing before our eyes—and failing most signally where the experiment has been tried most boldly. The failure is accelerating even as the forces pushing legalization are on what appears to be an inexorable march.

But, what about the kids?

persistent and heavy marijuana use among adolescents has been shown to reduce their IQ as adults by 6 to 8 points. An Australian study of identical twins found that a twin who started using cannabis before age 17 was 3 times more likely to attempt suicide than the twin who did not.People in Colorado had good reason to worry about teen drug use. Colorado voters had approved a limited experiment with medical marijuana in 2000. A complex series of judicial and administrative decisions in the mid-2000s overthrew most restrictions on the dispensing of marijuana. Between 2009 and 2012, the number of dispensaries jumped past 500, and the number of medical cardholders multiplied from roughly 1,000 to more than 108,000.

With so many medical-marijuana card-holders walking about, it was simply inevitable that some would re-sell their marijuana to underage users. A 2013 study of Colorado teens in drug treatment found that 74 percent had shared somebody else’s medical marijuana. The number of occasions on which they had shared averaged over 50 times. According to a report by the Rocky Mountain High-Intensy Drug Trafficking Area, Colorado teens, by 2012, were 50 percent more likely to use marijuana than their peers in the rest of the country.

Debates about marijuana tend to travel pretty fast into the domain of libertarian ideology: I’m a consenting adult, why can’t I do what I want? Yet the best customers for the marijuana industry are not adults at all. The majority of people who try marijuana quit by age 30. Adults in their twenties are significantly less likely than high school students to smoke; 14 percent of twentysomethings say they smoke marijuana, while 22.7 percent of 12th-graders smoke at least once a month, and 6.5 percent say they smoke every day.

Why do people quit using marijuana as they mature? Your guess is as good as anybody else’s, but whatever the reason, the trend presents marijuana sellers with a marketing problem. Yet there is promising news from the emerging marijuana industry’s point of view: People who start smoking in their teens are significantly more likely to become dependent than people who start smoking later: about 1 in 6, as opposed to 1 in 10. Start them young; keep them longer. Very rationally, then, the marijuana industry is rolling out products designed to appeal to the youngest consumers: cannabis-infused soda, cannabis-infused chocolate taffy, cannabis-infused jujubes.

The promise that legalization will actually protect teenagers from marijuana is false. So, too, are the other promises of the legalizers. It is false to claim that marijuana legalization will break drug cartels. Those cartels will continue to traffic in harder and more lucrative drugs, such as heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Criminal cartels may well stay in the marijuana business, too, marketing directly to underage users. Public policy is about trade-offs, and marijuana users need to face up to the trade-off they are urging on American society. Legal marijuana use means more marijuana use, and more marijuana use means above all more teen marijuana use.

Since 1996, 20 states and the District of Columbia have approved “medical marijuana” laws, whereby people who obtain a prescription from a doctor can legally use or purchase marijuana. As in Colorado, many of these supposed medical regimes are degenerating into legalization by another name. Oregon, for example: At the end of 2012, it was home to 56,531 medical-marijuana patients. The majority of these 56,000-plus permissions were approved by only nine doctors. One doctor—an 80-year-old retired heart surgeon in Yakima—approved 4,180 medical-marijuana applications in a span of 12 months. Only 4 percent of Oregon’s medical-marijuana patients, as of the end of 2012, suffered from cancer. Only 1 percent were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. The large majority, 57 percent, cited unspecified “pain” as the ailment for which treatment was sought. Yet none of the nine doctors who wrote the majority of the marijuana prescriptions was a pain specialist.

Marijuana does possess certain medicinal properties. So does opium. But we don’t allow unscrupulous quacks to write raw opium prescriptions for anyone willing to pay $65. And if we did, would anybody be surprised that the vast majority of opium buyers were not recovering from surgery—and that many of them shared or resold some of their opium to underage users?

Some older adults have a hard time crediting the dangers of marijuana use because they imagine the marijuana on sale today is the same low-grade stuff they smoked in college. The marijuana sold in the 1980s averaged between 3 and 4 percent THC, the psychoactive ingredient. Today’s selectively bred marijuana averages over 12 percent THC, with some strains reaching 30 percent. Hundreds of YouTube videos will show you how to combust a marijuana wax with butane, to boost the THC content to 90 percent. As marijuana consumers shift from smoking to ingesting marijuana, they can ingest larger and larger doses of THC at a time. Since 2006, Colorado emergency rooms have seen a steep rise in the number of patients arriving panicked and disoriented from excess THC, including a near doubling of patients ages 13 and 14.

What exactly defines marijuana impairment remains fiercely contested by an increasingly assertive marijuana industry. It took Colorado four tries to enact a legal definition of marijuana impairment: five nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood. Yet even once enacted, the standard remains very difficult to enforce. Alcohol impairment can be detected with a Breathalyzer. Marijuana impairment is revealed only by a blood test, and long-established law requires police to obtain a search warrant before a blood test is administered.

More important than catching impaired drivers after the fact is deterring them before they get behind the wheel. In the absence of a blood-testing kit, marijuana users themselves will find it difficult to know how much is too much. Time recently quoted a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Transportation: “It’s not like alcohol. People metabolize it differently. There are different potencies,” the official said. “So there’s really no solution in terms of saying ‘you’re now at the limit.’ I just don’t think there’s enough research that we can say, ‘Wait x amount of hours before getting on the road.’ I don’t know whether it’s five hours or 10 hours or the next day. We just don’t know.”

The United States is currently recovering feebly from the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Prospects for young people especially have narrowed. Are we really going to say to them: “Look, we haven’t got jobs for you, your chances at marriage are dwindling, you may be 30 before you can move out of your parents’ place into a home of your own, but we’ll make it up to you with pot, video games, and online porn”? They want to start life, but they are being offered instead only narcotic dreams.

As human beings, our judgment is not only imperfect, but is prone to fail in highly predictable ways. Insert a recurring charge onto our phone bill, and we will soon cease to notice it. We evolved under conditions where sugars and salt were scarce, and so we will eat far more than we need if given the chance. We overestimate our luck and will gamble our money in ways that make no mathematical sense. Our brains are wired for addictions. If a substance can trigger that addiction, it can overthrow all the reasoning and moral faculties of the mind.

Lucrative industries have arisen to exploit these weaknesses in ways highly harmful to their customers. And the bold irony is that when their practices are challenged, they’ll invoke the very principles of individual choice and self-mastery that their industry is based on negating and defeating. So it was with tobacco. So it is with casino gambling. So it will be with marijuana.

The resistance will be all the weaker since the costs of marijuana legalization will be borne by people to whom American legislatures pay scant attention anyway. Marijuana retailers will be located most densely in America’s poorest neighborhoods, just as liquor and cigarette retailing is now. Out of whose pockets will the marijuana taxes of the future be paid? Whose addiction and recovery services will be least well funded? In a society in which it is already sufficiently difficult for people to rise from the bottom, who’ll find that their rise has become harder still?

Read more here.

Have we been infantilizing young Americans?

Camille Paglia writes an opinion column in Time Magazine in which she laments our national minimum drinking age.

It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote, marry, enter contracts, and serve in the military at 18 but cannot buy an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant. The age 21 rule sets the United States apart from all advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

What this cruel 1984 law did is deprive young people of safe spaces where they could happily drink cheap beer, socialize, chat, and flirt in a free but controlled public environment. Hence in the 1980s we immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg parties, cut off from the adult world. Women in that boorish free-for-all were suddenly fighting off date rape. Club drugs — Ecstasy, methamphetamine, ketamine (a veterinary tranquilizer) — surged at raves for teenagers and on the gay male circuit scene.

Alcohol relaxes, facilitates interaction, inspires ideas, and promotes humor and hilarity. Used in moderation, it is quickly flushed from the system, with excess punished by a hangover. But deadening pills, such as today’s massively overprescribed anti-depressants, linger in body and brain and may have unrecognized long-term side effects. Those toxic chemicals, often manufactured by shadowy firms abroad, have been worrisomely present in a recent uptick of unexplained suicides and massacres.

As a libertarian, I support the decriminalization of marijuana, but there are many problems with pot. From my observation, pot may be great for jazz musicians and Beat poets, but it saps energy and will-power and can produce physiological feminization in men. Also, it is difficult to measure the potency of plant-derived substances like pot. With brand-name beer or liquor, however, purchased doses have exactly the same strength and purity from one continent to another, with no fear of contamination by dangerous street additives like PCP.

Alcohol’s enhancement of direct face-to-face dialogue is precisely what is needed by today’s technologically agile generation, magically interconnected yet strangely isolated by social media. Clumsy hardcore sexting has sadly supplanted simple hanging out over a beer at a buzzing dive. By undermining the art of conversation, the age 21 law has also had a disastrous effect on our arts and letters, with their increasing dullness and mediocrity. This tyrannical infantilizing of young Americans must stop!

Read more here

Cancer research

From BBC News:

The globe is facing a "tidal wave" of cancer, and restrictions on alcohol and sugar need to be considered, say World Health Organization scientists.

It predicts the number of cancer cases will reach 24 million a year by 2035, but half could be prevented.

The WHO said there was now a "real need" to focus on cancer prevention by tackling smoking, obesity and drinking.

The World Cancer Research Fund said there was an "alarming" level of naivety about diet's role in cancer.

One of the report's editors, Dr Bernard Stewart from the University of New South Wales in Australia, said prevention had a "crucial role in combating the tidal wave of cancer which we see coming across the world".

"The extent to which we modify the availability of alcohol, the labelling of alcohol, the promotion of alcohol and the price of alcohol - those things should be on the agenda."

He said there was a similar argument to be had with sugar fuelling obesity, which in turn affected cancer risk.

"In the UK, about a third of the most common cancers could be prevented through being a healthy weight, eating a healthy diet and being regularly physically active.

"These results show that many people still seem to mistakenly accept their chances of getting cancer as a throw of the dice, but by making lifestyle changes today, we can help prevent cancer tomorrow."

It advises a diet packed with vegetables, fruit, and wholegrains; cutting down on alcohol and red meat; and junking processed meat completely.

Dr Jean King, Cancer Research UK's director of tobacco control, said: "The most shocking thing about this report's prediction that 14 million cancer cases a year will rise to 22 million globally in the next 20 years is that up to half of all cases could be prevented.

I eat a sandwich chocked full of processed meats and cheese every day. Goodbye. Actually, isn't the reason cancer is on the increase because of the fact that people are living longer?

Maybe it's time we fight all addictive drugs!

Chuck Norris speaks out on marijuana legalization:

Maybe it's time we fight all addictive drugs instead of making excuses for using them. Maybe it's time we teach and model for young people that life can be good enough on its own merit without altering reality by drug use.

I'm not here making a case for or against the medicinal use of marijuana. However, it's very difficult for me to believe that America, average healthy Americans and particularly our younger generations are going to be better off with pot's legalization.

I'm all for freedom, but when liberty turns into licentiousness, it's time to reconsider why we're doing what we're doing.

The flip side of celebrating

Officials in Denver are worried that if the Broncos lose to the Patriots tomorrow, there may be a spike in domestic violence. Yeah, we men are just waiting for an excuse, aren't we?

On a related news item, a State Representative has proposed allowing bars to continue to serve alcohol all night long until 7 a.m. The law now requires establishments to close at 2 a.m. That is when there are fights, shootings, and other violence because of the drunks flowing out into the streets.

Is society weakened?

Mary Katharine's argument, that when regulated by the state marijuana will be harder to get, is an argument I have heard kids make. When I did child protection work, teens told me that marijuana was easier to get than alcohol. Marijuana was illegal and alcohol was state regulated. What was your experience?

I agree with Juan when he says that he does not want his children smoking cigarettes, weed, or drinking alcohol.

Is anyone as rude and obnoxious as Bill O'Reilly? Watch how he "discounts" Juan Williams and accuses Mary Katharine of "babbling," when she is speaking very clearly.

We'd be better off

How did I vote on Colorado's legalization of marijuana? I voted against it. I read the arguments of libertarians and National Review columnists in favor of legalization. But in the end, when pulling the lever, I thought that the dangers to society outweighed the benefits.

Damon Linker gleefully lambasts self-proclaimed conservatives:

The biggest problem with this line of argument, as hordes of merciless Twitter critics have pointed out, is that alcohol is legal, despite the fact that it produces numerous negative personal and social consequences, and arguably more of them than marijuana does or ever will. If we were starting over from scratch, dispassionately examining the comparative effects of alcohol and marijuana, we would likely conclude that both of them should be legal or both of them illegal (depending on our views of personal freedom and our willingness to pay the costs of those negative consequences).

You can ban them both as far as I'm concerned. Cigarettes, too! No. I am not serious, but wouldn't we be better off if people did not get hooked on any of that crap?