Not being a drinker myself, I can look dispassionately at the clusterfuck that is the fiction of alcohol limits in that it doesn’t really affect me one way or the other. It’s not me being hectored to drink sensibly.
Remember, the “safe limits” statistic was not based on scientific research, it was pulled out of the ether by people who were making it up as they went along and have recently admitted as much.
Today, Auntie trumpets the latest finger wagging nanny-state admonishment of the proles that is the “Know Your Limits” campaign.
Three-quarters of drinkers do not know a typical glass of wine contains three units of alcohol, a survey for the Department of Health suggests.
Yeah? So? And what business is this of anyone else’s? As long as they don’t get pissed and drive home, that, surely is up to them. I wouldn’t know how many units there are in a large glass of wine and could care less. After all, the units and safe drinking stuff is all made up.
The YouGov survey of 1,429 drinkers in England found more than a third did not know their recommended daily limit – 2-3 units for women and 3-4 for men.
Why should they? It’s all made up.
The survey coincides with a government campaign to promote careful drinking.
Here we go… Nanny knows best. Nanny is going to tell us how much we should be drinking, based on figures that are all made up.
The internet survey found half those questioned drank alcohol at least two or three times a week.
Really? Gosh, how awful! And this is a problem because? Oh, that’s right, it isn’t.
The Know Your Limits campaign aims to tell drinkers how many units are now in their drinks and help them stick to their recommended limits.
And how much of our money has been squandered on this bunk, I wonder?
There is a series of new adverts on television, radio and newspapers showing the number of units in individual drinks.
Rather a lot, it would seem – £10m according to the Times.
Ordinary family situations – where, I might point out, people are more likely to be drinking sensibly.
Mrs Primarolo said the campaign was aimed at over 25s who were less aware of what a unit was than younger people.
The Englishman has a comment about Primarolo’s fatuous comment:
It isn’t the over 25s who are fighting on the streets, it isn’t the over 25s who are learning about alcohol for the first time, it isn’t the bloody over 25s who need to be educated about some limits that were just plucked out of the air, not based on any firm evidence at all.
But it is the over 25s who have to pay for this through their taxes; it’s about time that the nannies “Knew Their Limits”.
Indeed so. Can’t really add much to that.
yup. similar garbage re Passive Smoking too, where the solitary long-term study of same, set up by rabid anti-smoking campaigner scientists, produced results so wildly at odds with the Virtue Bandwagon that they lost all their funding. to the researchers’ credit, they were simultaneously so amazed AND professional, that they sought other funding to continue the study (and consequently became pariahs in the anti-smoking lobby).
(interestingly, all the research shows increasing nicotine levels per-cigarette reduces smoking, typically exponentially. and all the research shows that the damage, both short-term and long-term, is done by the _smoke_ not the smoke’s _contents_. yep, low-nicotine/low-tar cigarettes are wildly LESS healthy than high-nicotine ones.)
coupla other UK alcohol related things:
• i’ve been in a drink-driving experiment myself, at uni – part of a guy’s PhD. EVERYONE got BETTER up to about 0.08/0.10. the researchers said, yeah that’s what normally happens. but you can’t get published if you put that in, so everyone cherrypicks till they find something negative and then publish that.
to be fair, in a driving environment, the deterioration a bit further on after that was quite variable by person and occasionally quite sudden, so about .08/.10 seems a good place to set an on-average safe-to-drive limit, allowing for natural human/social variability.
• did you know in the UK that you have NO right to a blood test for drinkdriving? only breathalyser. problem: the breathalyser is very unreliable and is only under special circumstances strictly related to blood alcohol. it’s just a chemical reaction and not restricted to alcohol. for example, gluesniffers go off the scale, and i myself on a UK diet (interestingly, not an Australian one) blow a rock-steady 0.018 according the official police kit – same as a notional glass of wine/halfpint beer. consider that i can NEVER register sober on a breathalyser so if for any reason a 0 limit is introduced (like some countries’ P-plates or speeding-offenders have), i would be technically a criminal every time i pulled out of the driveway.
and UK doesn’t even have the _legal_ requirements to allow for mouth alcohol that other countries do, so if you really enjoy big reds, keep the hell off the road for at least a day. your mouth tissue will blow you off the scale.
interestingly, this means an IRON-CLAD defence is to pull an empty bottle of scotch out of your pocket in the station and claim you drank it between getting picked up and arriving at the station — its formal legal description is the “hip-flask defence”. awesome.
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oh, another research-ignored-in-favour-of-VirtueMemes example is the touting last year of the “benefits” of scotland’s first 12mths of smoking ban. “children” where “shown” to have improved levels of bloodstream defence-markers.
actually, no. across the board there was no change. EXCEPT for primary school kids under the age of 11 who showed a slight but significant drop.
don’t tend to see many of them in the pubs, do you?
whatever caused this drop, it wasn’t the smoking ban.
Saltations last blog post..Wikipedia — WikiSal