Today would have been Michael Jackson’s 66th birthday. I’ll be playing some jazz and having a pint of something yummy in his honor. I first met Michael in the early 1990s, shortly after my beer book was published. He is all but single-handedly responsible for the culture of better beer that exists today. He began writing about good beer in the 1960s and 70s and his writing has influenced (and continues to influence) generations of homebrewers and commercial brewers, many of whom were inspired to start their own breweries by his words. There are few others, if any, that have been so doggedly persistent and passionate about spreading the word about great beer. I know some of my earliest knowledge and appreciation of beer, and especially its history and heritage, came from Michael’s writings. Michael passed away seven months ago, in late August. I still miss him, and I suspect I’m not the only one. Join me in drinking a toast to Michael Jackson, the most influential beer writer who’s ever lived.
At the Great Divide Brewing’s media party in Denver over ten years ago.
On stage accepting the first beer writing awards from the Brewers Association with Jim Cline, GM of Rogue, Stan Hieronymus, who writes Real Beer’s Beer Therapy among much else, and Ray Daniels of the Brewers Association.
At GABF in 2006, still wearing the same glasses. But my, oh my, have I changed. Sheesh.
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Hilarious. I love this story of British publicans taking matters into their own hands. It seems the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, placed a 4p increase on the price of a pint, at a time when a pint already costs 25p more than it did one month ago, plus has “pledged to raise duty on alcohol by 2% above inflation for the next four years.” His budget is seen as only helping supermarket chains, whose share of the beer market has increased due to cheap pricing, which many have termed “pretty irresponsible alcohol retailing.” Pubs had already been losing ground to retail pricing wars and had asked for a freeze on prices to hep save pubs. Apparently, Darling was deaf to their concerns and now they’ve responded by banning him from every pub in England (or at least in all the participating ones—which after one day numbers 170). Obviously, the actual banning will do little to change things, but presumably the attendant publicity might.
They’ve created a poster which they’re encouraging pub owners to display in the window of their establishment featuring Darling behind bars and the word BARRED in large block letters.
It’s even spread to Brussels, where at least one pub—O’Farrells—has also put the poster in their front window. UK Independence Party head Nigel Farage noticed while there earlier today, about which he is quoted.
“Every politician who voted for the smoking ban and an increase in alcohol taxes at this difficult time for our pubs should be banned,” said Farage.
“However, most of our politicians are so detached from reality that they probably don’t visit pubs.”
They’ve also set up a group about the ban on Facebook.
I can think of plenty of our own politicians we should do likewise with.
This is the poster is available for download.
Propaganda is, of course, not a new development and has been around as long as there have been people to manipulate and public opinion to shape. And while propaganda the word has taken on derogatory connotations, the concept itself is largely neutral, though personally I tend to be skeptical of propaganda’s higher purposes. I’d say as a general rule if we agree with the position being pushed by propaganda than we tend to view it as benign whereas if we disagree with it then we similarly view it as being dangerous.
I bring this up because the Society of Independent Brewers, a trade organization in England that appears to be similar to the Brewers Association here and represents over 400 small brewers, is reviving and updating some very old propaganda by English painter William Hogarth. Hogarth was a painter, printer, satirist and above all social critic during his lifetime, which was from 1697 until 1764. He has also been credited with pioneering sequential art, paving the way for comic strips. In 1751, he created two contrasting works of art, Beer Street and Gin Lane.
BEER STREET Beer, happy product of our Isle Can sinewy strength impart, And, wearied with fatigue and toil, Can cheer each manly heart. Labor and Art, upheld by thee, Successfully advance; We quaff thy balmy juice with glee, And Water leave to France. Genius of Health, thy grateful taste Rivals the cup of Jove, And warms each English generous breast With Liberty and Love. |
GIN LANE Gin, cursed fiend! with fury fraught, Makes human race a prey; It enters by a deadly draught, And steals our life away. Virtue and Truth, driv’n to despair, Its rage compels to fly; But cherishes, with hellish care, Theft, Murder, Perjury. Damn’d cup! that on the vitals preys, That liquid fire contains, Which madness to the heart conveys, And rolls it through the veins. |
The poems below each print appeared on the originals and were written by Reverend James Townley. Click on Beer Street (on left) or Gin Lane (on right) to see larger, more detailed versions of each print.
Essentially the pair of prints were intended to make the case that beer is a reasonable, healthier alternative to hard alcohol, in this case gin, which had become very popular at that time. The poems are classic examples of propaganda, appealing to jingoism and emotional but ultimately irrational arguments. Much as I’d like it to be, beer isn’t the answer to all of life’s problems any more than gin is the cause of them. But according to the basic accounts of that time period, by 1750 something like one-quarter of all homes in one area of London’s West End known as St. Giles Circus were gin houses. Imagine any neighborhood where every fourth place was a bar or brewery. That would probably seem like a huge problem, then or now.
From Wikipedia:
Beer Street and Gin Lane are two prints issued in 1751 by English artist William Hogarth in support of what would become the Gin Act. Designed to be viewed alongside each other, they depict the evils of the consumption of gin as a contrast to the merits of drinking beer. At almost the same time, Hogarth’s friend Henry Fielding published: An Inquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers which dealt with the same subject. Issued with The Four Stages of Cruelty, the prints continued a movement which Hogarth had started in Industry and Idleness, away from depicting the laughable foibles of fashionable society (as he had done with Marriage à-la-mode) and towards a more cutting satire on the problems of poverty and crime.
On the simplest level, Hogarth portrays the inhabitants of Beer Street as happy and healthy, nourished by the native English ale, and those who live in Gin Lane as destroyed by their addiction to the foreign spirit of gin; but, as with so many of Hogarth’s works, closer inspection uncovers other targets of his satire, and reveals that the poverty of Gin Lane and the prosperity of Beer Street are more intimately connected than they at first appear. Gin Lane shows shocking scenes of infanticide, starvation, madness, decay and suicide, while Beer Street depicts industry, health, bonhomie and thriving commerce, but there are contrasts and subtle details that allude to the prosperity of Beer Street as the cause of the misery found in Gin Lane.
PUB STREET Pub, happy product of our Isle Gives Company, Good Cheer, and here Work done, each man may spend a while With pleasant Talk enjoy his Beer And sullen Youth, in Girls and Pool I-Diess kids can learn the Art |
BINGE LANE The couch-potato cheers the game With lonely pizza, 6-pack drinks Every booze-filled fridge’s the same— Each man at home in stupor sinks Fiendish Vodka, eight quid the Bottle In Alcopops our Children find |
The poems below each of the modern prints appear to echo the spirit of the originals though I haven’t seen any information about who wrote them, though a Peter Amor is credited for something at the bottom right-hand corner of each. And I must confess I don’t know what some of idiomatic words mean, such as I-Diess kids, ASBOs or CSO’s. Click on Pub Street (on left) or Binge Lane (on right) to see larger, more detailed versions of each print.
The idea with the new contrasting prints is to contrast and encourage people drinking in pubs (something SIBA has a pecuniary interest in, of course) with being drunk on the street and buying cheap bargain beer at grocery stores. They also hope the updated works will help raise awareness of the problems with binge drinking that have been in the news of late in Britain. The new prints are by UK artist Enoch Sweetman. As the BBC put it, “[i]n Pub Street, people are seen as relaxed and happy” whereas “Binge Lane shows youths fighting and drunken schoolgirls.”
Both are finely detailed and there’s a lot to look at that’s not immediately apparent at first. There are many little events going on throughout each illustration, which makes it fun to keep looking at it as you keep discovering new stories and symbolism.
SIBA’s own press release spins it like this:
In the new pictures, Gin Lane is renamed Binge Lane, a scene of violence, unconsciousness and under-age drinking in the midst of shops selling cheap beer, alcopops and Vin de Toilette.
Beer Street becomes Pub Street, a peaceful environment of real ale, good food, bar games and live entertainment, according to one of the pub signs in the picture.
Rhymes beneath Hogarth’s originals speak of gin as a “cursed fiend, with fury fraught”, which “cherishes with hellish care theft, murder, perjury”. But beer is praised as a “happy produce of our isle”, which “warms each English generous breast with liberty and love”. SIBA chairman Peter Amor says: “The gin of the 18th century may have been replaced by a whole trolley of cheap drinks, but the message is the same.
“The pub is practically the only place where you can drink draught beer and people’s behaviour there is subject to strict controls by the licensee and by the presence of mature, well behaved regular customers who wouldn’t stand for any kind of trouble. “The real source of the problems that are being sensationally highlighted by the media at the moment is cheap liquor sold in bulk and, in a minority of supermarkets and off-licences, without much regard to the age of the people buying it.
“In the circumstances, it is totally unfair to lump pubs in with the real perpetrators of the problem.” SIBA’s campaign will include lobbying MPs and peers, to make them aware that pubs are not in the main the culprits of the current perceived rash of binge drinking, and working with other trade and consumer organisations with interests in the brewing and licensing sectors to form a broad alliance in support of the positive aspects of the British pub.
So what I take away from all of this is that what SIBA’s trying to do is preemptively head off the neo-prohibitionists who have been getting horror stories of binge drinking into the news with increasing effectiveness. If memory serves (and I’m sure the historians out there will confirm or refute it for me, —Bob? —Maureen?) our own brewers did the same thing prior to Prohibition trying to distance themselves from the social problems associated with whiskey and other hard liquor and portray beer as a healthful alternative. But it was too little, too late, and the prohibitionists continued to paint all alcohol with the same broad brush. The cynic in me thinks this won’t be terribly effective either, especially since, unlike in Hogarth’s time, there are many more diversions available that will make it more difficult for two black and white cartoon prints to have much of an impact.
In the updated version they seem to splitting the hairs even finer, trying to distinguish good drinking behavior from bad, and distinguishing it by where it’s taking place. A worthy endeavor, to be sure, but one which the average neo-prohibitionist seems predestined to not consider for even one nanosecond. But perhaps I’m mis-reading their intentions, which they state are to separate good pub drinking from bad binge drinking. That may be a tough sell. Some people can drink in their home without incident and I suspect that at least from time to time a binge drinker may go on a bender in a pub. In the end, I’m not sure it’s only the location where someone drinks that determines his or her behavior. It may be a factor, of course, but it doesn’t seem as black and white as Pub Street and Binge Lane pictures it.
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Purity Brewery, a newer British microbrewery in Warwickshire, England, became the first brewery in the UK to earn a Red Tractor Assurance Mark for one of its beers, Farmer’s Harvest.
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From their website:
The beer was brewed to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the National Farmers’ Union in the UK. |
In a sense, the Red Tractor mark is similar to labeling something organic, except that the goal is to promote local ingredients in a variety of goods, with a standard of quality, too. It is administered by Assured Food Standards (or AFS), which is a trade group “owned by the entire food industry. It represents interests from each of the key links in the food chain, including the National Farmer’s Union, the Ulster Farmers Union, the Meat & Livestock Commission, Dairy UK and the British Retail Consortium. Observers include DEFRA and the Food and Drink Federation.” Their stated objective:
AFS believes that the Red Tractor has a major role to play in the future of British food and farming — by promoting recognition of professionally-produced assured food, and by boosting the reputation of food production in the UK. We do this by first establishing the benchmark for production and then ensuring that producers, processors and other operators continually meet those standards by carrying out regular and robust audits.
Purity Brewing was founded in 2005 and makes two beers in addition to Farmer’s Harvest, Pure UBU (an amber that’s 4.5% abv) and Pure Gold (a 3.8% abv golden ale). The Pure UBU was chosen last year as one of the world’s top fifty beers at the International Beer Challenge, an international competition headquartered in the UK. The Supreme Champion that same year was none other than Deschutes’ The Abyss. Based solely on their website, they appear to be a well-funded craft brewer, but with the accolades one dares to hope they care about the beer, too. I’m certainly looking forward to giving them a try on my next visit across the pond.
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last forty years you undoubtedly know the iconic image of the album cover to the Beatles’ seminal work, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. There have been countless homages and parodies of the cover, from Frank Zappa to the Celebrator Beer News, who used it initially for their tenth anniversary. Their version, of course, features well know figures from the brewing industry, both past and present.
The original and the Celebrator’s beer world view.
Well, it seems there’s more of a connection to beer than first thought, as the artist who designed the Sgt. Pepper cover Peter Blake, has designed the label artwork for a new beer, which has been named the official beer of Liverpool, European Capital of Culture 2008. Better known simply as Liverpool 08, it’s a yearlong cultural event with something like 350 events taking place in Liverpool. There will be “more than 50 international festivals in art, architecture, ballet, comedy, cinema, food, literature, music, opera, science and theatre.” One billion people from more than 60 countries, across five continents, are expected to visit and/or participate.
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The beer itself is brewed by Cains, a Liverpudlian brewery that’s been brewing since 1870. Cains is using their award-winning Cain’s Finest Lager, which won awards at the 2005 CAMRA festival in Liverpool and “Best English Beer” at the 2005 CAMRA Scotland Beer Festival.
From the website:
About 250,000 bottles will be produced, and it will also be available at the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern galleries in addition to the usual supermarkets and other outlets. They’ll keep using the label all year, but will discontinue it December 31. The BBC reported on it’s origin today as follows:
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Cains chief executive Sudarghara Dusanj said: “Sir Peter Blake is one of country’s best loved artists and, through his work with the Beatles, has built a strong affiliation with Liverpool so we couldn’t think of anyone better.
“The final design is truly striking.”
No doubt the bottle will be highly sought after by breweriana collectors.
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We’ve had the Big Three — Bud, Miller and Coors — for so long now that it would probably take me a few years to stop using the term. In the UK, once upon a time it was the Big Six; and they included Allied Breweries, Bass Charrington, Courage Imperial, Scottish & Newcastle, Watneys, and Whitbread. Until yesterday, only S&N remained. With the announcement earlier today of Carlsberg and Heineken’s buyout of Scottish & Newcastle, the last vestige of a bygone era will soon disappear, as well. England’s esteemed Financial Times today has a somewhat sad commentary on this entitled Few Crying into Beers at Decline of Big Six Breweries. As they observe, the change in the beer market and the mergers that began around 1989 have now come to a final solution, and with no one left to mourn them.
Here’s a few statistics. Since the turn of the century, imported beer to the UK has increased by 50%. During that same time, the number of large breweries fell by two-thirds. Today, a mere six remain, with 34 more considered regional breweries. Since the 1980s, the number of breweries has actually tripled, but that’s because of the UK’s own microbrewery revolution, which today includes over 500 small breweries whose total production accounts for only 2% of the nation’s beer market. Before today’s buyout, Heineken enjoyed only 1% of the total British market, but after the deal is approved they will have something in the neighborhood of 30%, making them Great Britain’s biggest beer company.
Maybe none of this matters. After all, as the FT’s editorial makes clear, British pub-goers, publicans and pub operators, and even CAMRA’s real ale aficionados will all be dishearteningly unmoved by today’s news. I can’t help but think that’s a mistake. So much of our early microbreweries owe such a great debt to the heritage and history of English ales that it seems a shame to let this dismal milestone pass so cavalierly. Perhaps I’ve romanticized these old breweries too much, but I don’t feel the same loathing for their products or their business practices that I usually do for our Big Three. That may simply be the 1,000-mile expanse of ocean separating me from everyday contact, who knows? But even though the British beer industry is nowhere near deceased, this is just one more wound that will again forever alter its landscape. I, for one, in the words of the immortal Edgar Allen Poe, “am drinking ale today.”
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It looks like the brewing brouhaha involving several large multi-national beer companies that I wrote about last week is going to be resolved more quickly then anybody had anticipated. The Carlsberg Group and Heineken today agreed to a $15.3 billion buyout of Scottish & Newcastle. The deal is structured such that Carlsberg will get sole ownership of BBH (Baltic Beverages Holding), giving them access to the lucrative Russian beer market, and will also receive S&N’s markets in China, France and Greece. Heineken will gain control of S&N’s markets in Great Britain, India, the United States and a few others. Business experts don’t seem to think there will a problem in getting the deal approved or with any counter-offers.
Note: Portfolio’s online website has a good overview of this story, too.
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London’s famous Pearl Restaurant, located a stone’s throw from the Holborn tube station, is situated in a grand old bank building, the former Pearl Assurance Company’s headquarters. Inside there’s granite everywhere, opulent chandeliers and modern decor. Their food seems to be reviewed favorably by just about everybody and executive chef Jun Tanaka has one of the best reputations in the London restaurant scene, having worked at at least seven Michelin-rated places over the past decade before his own oyster opened to reveal the Pearl. He’s now “worked with beer gourmand Gustavo Bertolucci to find the best beers to match his dishes.”
While I don’t know if a schwarzbier will be on the actual beer list, it was the closest style to swine I could find. What hints that are given, in a story in Wine & Spirit Magazine, sound quite tasty.
Combinations include Kasteel Cru from Alsace to match salmon in filo with pomegranate, cauliflower and walnut salad and Innis & Gunn Oak Aged Ale with spiced loin of venison. Greenwich’s Meantime brewery’s Chocolate Stout is also being recommended as a partner to desserts.
It’s certainly nice to see more and more high end restaurants finally embracing beer as a part of the fine dining experience.
I hope my British friends and colleagues will forgive me for not noticing this before, because it’s been apparently going on for years now, but the folks at Shepherd Neame have been advertising their Spitfire Ale with a humorous campaign making fun of Wold War 2. Since the beer was named after the famous British military fighter plane, it does make sense. And if you think war isn’t something to be made fun of, all I can do is point you to Hogan’s Heroes and Roberto Benigi’s Life is Beautiful. Anyway, I thought they were humorous enough to share. Here’s a few of my favorites below, but there are many, many more at the Spitfire website.
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Harriet Easton, age 19, appears to be one ambitious and entrepreneurially-minded young lass. She’s determined to fill the void created by a continuing drop in UK pub beer sales. “Figures released last month showed beer sales in pubs at their lowest level for 70 years. Seven million fewer pints per day are now being sold, with sales down 49 per cent since they peaked in 1979.” One obvious market being neglected is the female segment. So Easton, a politics student at Newcastle University, spent a year and a half — and £35,000 — on R&D to create a beer especially for women. It’s a “light ale with extract of orange and a modest 4.2 per cent alcohol.” Easton teamed up with a local brewery, Hanby Ales of Wem in Shropshire, to create the curiously named Harry’s Beer, which will be marketed to women beginning Monday at the Salopian Bar in Shrewsbury. On hand will be, Paula Waters, chairman of CAMRA. “Waters said: ‘I applaud the inventive way Harriet has brought this product to market. She’s a sassy and savvy young woman who has recognised there are others just like her who want to drink real ale and retain their femininity.’”
But as far as I can tell, this is not her first attempt. In August of this year there was at least one story about Harriet Easton in the Shropshire Star called These Girls Are For Real. At that time, they reported Easton debuting another beer, this one called Rushing Dolls beer for girls. In that article, Rushing Dolls was described as having “a zest of lime—it’s very light and hoppy.” There Easton was quoted as having created her beer because others were — I just love this expression — too blokey. Hop Talk even did a post about it in September. The lime version was “thought to be the first ever beer for girls” and now the new orange version is being similarly touted, this time by the Publican, who say it’s the “first real ale aimed specifically at women.” This time around, Easton says:
“Real ale has typically and consistently been marketed towards men with names full of cheesy puns and innuendo, and images of buxom wenches serving up frothy jugs,” said the politics student at Newcastle university. “They can keep all that — there’s no need to move on, lads — just move over”.
Still, I can’t help but think of Virginia Slims or pink trains for girls. It seems to me either a woman will develop a taste for beer or she won’t. I know plenty of women who already love craft beer, including my wife, and it didn’t take a specially designed beer for them to like beer. Trying to make one specifically for the ladies seems like a gimmick at best. But if it brings more women into the fold, I suppose that can’t be all bad.
Maybe it’s just my peculiar sense of humor but anytime I hear the phrase “spot the … anything” I think of Monty Python, as in “Spot the Looney.” So that was my first thought when I heard that Britain’s Home Office had issued very specific guidelines to members of the police on “How to Spot a Drunk.”
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A few days ago the UK’s Home Office launched a new campaign against — and here’s the part I don’t get — being drunk in a bar. It’s called the “Responsible Sales of Alcohol Campaign” and British and Welsh police have apparently identified 1,500 pubs that they will be visiting every weekend between now and Christmas Eve to make sure that no bartender “knowingly” sells any alcohol to someone who is drunk. To me, that’s already a weird law (more on that below) but it’s been on the books for awhile now, though up until now there’s been no shortage of confusion about exactly what it means, legally at least, to be drunk. Anyone found selling to a drunk person will be levied “an £80 fixed-penalty fine.” But now the Home Office has issued more specific guidelines trying to define drunkenness. They have no legal standing, of course, but they are asking the police to use them to “identify potential drunken customers” and then “gather evidence of drunkenness, witness a sale and deal accordingly”. So even though it’s claimed that they do not have actual legal standing, if the police are using the guidelines, as they’ve been asked to, then they de facto do have standing. |
Here’s the part I don’t get, though. If you can’t be drunk in a pub, where exactly are you allowed to be drunk? Since when is it the business of the police to decide how pissed anyone wants to get on any given evening? I think in many states here a bartender’s not supposed to serve a person if they’re excessively drunk — equally difficult to gauge and define. But this law makes it sound like you are permitted to go to a pub, order a beer, drink it, perhaps have another, but the moment you’re drunk you have to stop drinking immediately or the pub owner will face a hefty fine. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Assuming I’m not bothering anyone else and as long as I’m walking, taking a taxi or otherwise not endangering anyone but myself how the f@#k is that anyone’s business but mine? I should be able to drink until I can’t stand up straight if I want to. I’m not saying that’s a good idea or that anyone should want to drink that much, but the point is simply that it should not be the government’s business to protect me from myself. That’s what friends and loved ones are for. That’s paternalism at it’s worst.
So here are the guidelines:
A Noticeable Change in Behaviour
A Lack of Judgment
Clumsiness & Loss of Coordination
Decreased Alertness
Appearance
I think you’ll agree after perusing his list that many of the items here are obvious and self-evident. Defining being drunk is a bit like pornography: it may be hard to define but we all think we know it when we see it. But others make almost no sense at all, especially by themselves. This story originally appeared in the British trade publication, The Publican, and many of the pub owners they interviewed agreed, to wit:
Licensees have slammed the guidelines. David Wine, licensee at the Six Bells in Felsham, Suffolk, said: “This is an absolute nonsense. So what if someone is dishevelled? Does that mean Bob Geldof will not be able to get served in pubs?”
Steve Andrews, licensee at the Seven Stars in Devon agreed the campaign was “absolutely ludicrous”. “I have a lot of farmers and builders come in here and they’re dishevelled.”
“I would also question why police should be paid to sit around in pubs on a Friday and Saturday night.”
Yeah, that disheveled one does stand out. It’s as if you’ll have to dress up to go to your local if you want to be served. Since when does good grooming and a fashion sense equate with soberness? The “bumping into furniture” and “spilling drinks” would give my wife some trouble, as she tends to be quite clumsy without the slightest amount of alcohol in her bloodstream. Even if any of these aren’t dispositive, they will undoubtedly get you noticed by the bar Bobby as someone who bears closer watching. And that hardly seems fair: targeting the butterfingered and slovenly for special attention. Don’t they already have enough to worry about?
Overall, looney does seem the right word to describe this scheme to keep barkeeps from overserving to enforce a law that seems quite odd in the first place. Can this really be the most important thing Britain’s police force has to contend with right now? Surely there must be some more serious threats to the peace.
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I happened upon this item from across the pond at Zythophile, who appears to be a soul mate when it comes to disliking neo-prohibitionists and their attendant propaganda. The UK’s Times Online made a rather startling, if not altogether surprising, revelation that the Department of Health in Great Britain, in defining what it means to be a “hazardous drinker” in 1987 did so by essentially just making it up and pulling the numbers out of thin air. I’ll let that sink in. As the Times’ article puts it, the “guidelines have no basis in science. Rather, in the words of a member of the committee that drew them up, they were simply ‘plucked out of the air’.” The twenty year-old standards by the Royal College of Physicians set “safe limits” at 21 units of alcohol a week for a man and 14 for a woman, apparently without regard to weight so far as I can tell. Britain defines one unit of alcohol as “8 grams of pure ethanol.”
In the article, a doctor involved in creating the standard, reminisces:
Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the college’s working party on alcohol, told The Times yesterday that the figures were not based on any clear evidence. He remembers “rather vividly” what happened when the discussion came round to whether the group should recommend safe limits for men and women.
“David Barker was the epidemiologist on the committee and his line was that ‘We don’t really have any decent data whatsoever. It’s impossible to say what’s safe and what isn’t’.
“And other people said, ‘Well, that’s not much use. If somebody comes to see you and says ‘What can I safely drink?’, you can’t say ‘Well, we’ve no evidence. Come back in 20 years and we’ll let you know’. So the feeling was that we ought to come up with something. So those limits were really plucked out of the air. They weren’t really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee.”
Well how scientific. And I’d think all well and good if it were just a guideline, some advice to tell a patient. But, of course, that’s not how the government used these numbers. They instead not only endorsed the numbers — and indeed why shouldn’t they having come from a supposedly reputable health organization — they essentially set them in stone, terrorizing citizens with them the same way America’s health bureaucracy does likewise by defining binge drinking at a ridiculous “five or more drinks in a row.”
Not only that, but they continued to cling to the numbers as gospel, despite numerous subsequent studies that contradicted those numbers. For example, here are the results of a 2000 study by the World Health Organization:
The WHO’s International Guide for Monitoring Alcohol Consumption and Related Harm set out drinking ranges that qualified people as being at low, medium or high-risk of chronic alcohol-related harm. For men, less than 35 weekly units was low-risk, 36-52.5 was medium-risk and above 53 was high-risk. Women were low-risk below 17.5 units, medium between 18 and 35 and high above 36.
Government bureaucracy has a habit of becoming entrenched even in the face of contrary evidence. At least one blogger I respect sees this as no big deal, that everyone simply knew the numbers were made up. Perhaps I wouldn’t be so bothered by that if I didn’t strongly believe my own government, in collusion with Big Pharma and much of the guilt-ridden medical community, has been lying — and continues to lie — to my face about my own son Porter’s autism. I think it’s a mistake to take lying so cavalierly, especially when it comes from an area of society that we’re conditioned to place great trust in: the medical community. The Hippocratic Oath was undoubtedly a good start, but the more I learn about the way doctors, their protectionist professional groups, along with medical insurers, pharmaceutical companies, hospital administrators and the like manipulate patients and society at large for their own purposes, the more that oath seems hypocritical and largely an anachronism in our modern world that medical science seems quick to ignore whenever it doesn’t suit them.
I think it’s precisely because people tend to trust doctors and so-called medical science that they often can’t conceive of it being used as propaganda or to support an extreme agenda. And that’s why I find this sort of lying so dangerous. We may take for granted that our government will lie to us or that people trying to persuade us of something might do likewise, but I don’t see how that makes it acceptable or something we shouldn’t get worked up about. Have we really all been lied to so much that we no longer recognize it? That it becomes acceptable if it’s for our own good? I can see how telling a fib to a child to keep him or her safe as a temporary solution has some merit, but if we don’t fess up when they get older, that’s an entirely different matter. Though personally, I think nowadays we overprotect children and go too far in trying to keep them from experiencing any adversity. As a result, they are incapable of dealing with even the smallest slight as young adults. This also makes it easier for our own government to continue becoming more and more paternalistic as each successive generation becomes increasingly comfortable with being told what to think and within what narrow range is acceptable. We’re all adults and yet more and more governments treat their citizens like children to be taken care of instead of allowing everyone to have a real say in decisions made on our behalf. That’s a classic example of a slippery slope. If you accept one lie because you believe it’s for your own good, then it becomes easier for you to accept the next one, and the next one after that, etcetera. I find this whole subject fascinating, and if you want to read more about it, I recommend Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, by Sissela Bok, and The Liar’s Tale, A History of Falsehood, by Jeremy Campbell.
As usual, I’ve veered off on a tangent, so let’s hear from another British doctor who also conveniently believes that the specific limits are superfluous.
Christopher Record, a liver-disease specialist at Newcastle University, suggested that “it doesn’t really matter what the limits are”. “What we do know is, the more you drink, the greater the risk. The trouble is that we all have different genes. Some people can drink considerably more than [the limits] and they won’t get into any trouble.”
Well that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. That means using a standard that doesn’t work is useless and counter-productive for predicting how a person will react to a given amount of alcohol. And if government continually uses false statistics to manage its population, it does them great harm, both psychologically and possibly physically. It would be one thing if for the last twenty years health officials told people that drinking too much had dire consequences and advocated that people take care in that regard. That would be quite sensible and without question in the public interest. But that’s not what the health agencies did. Instead, they made up a number and told people not to drink more than this amount or there would be dire health consequences, knowing full well that the the levels they set had no basis in science whatsoever.
I’m confident that our own definition of binge drinking had a similarly unscientific genesis and I know how that definition has been used to skew statistics toward a specific agenda by neo-prohibitionists. I would be shocked to learn that our British cousins never did likewise. When you officially and purposely set what it means to be a heavy drinker at a level you know to be too low, you can claim with a straight face that there are many more alcoholics plaguing society than there really are. Armed with these false statistics, committed anti-alcohol organizations can do a lot of harm to society.
I’m not entirely sure why governments tend to embrace neo-prohibitionist agendas, but Zythophile’s hypothesis bears examining.
My personal guess is that too many politicians — and members of public health committees — are in the game because they want to control others, and they associate drinking with loss of control, and therefore want to stop it: except they know, after the failure of prohibition in the United States, that stopping people drinking is impossible, and so they try to make us feel as guilty as possible about one of life’s best pleasures.
But whether they meant well or were being maliciously manipulative, this sort of lying by those entrusted with the public health is pretty hard to swallow.
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