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April 14, 2003
Modern Day Prohibitionists Want to Ration Your Alcohol
Most people would consider rationing alcohol positively draconian, but the "nearly 400 researchers, advocates, health professionals, and civic leaders" who gathered at Alcohol Policy Conference 13 last month are not "most" people. "Rationing of alcohol purchases -- limiting the amount individuals can buy in a given time-period -- has also been used as a means of regulating availability," Robin Room noted at "Alcohol Policy Conference 13." Room's presentation was titled "Preventing alcohol problems: Popular approaches are ineffective, effective approaches are politically impossible."
Most people would consider rationing alcohol positively draconian, but the "nearly 400 researchers, advocates, health professionals, and civic leaders" who gathered at Alcohol Policy Conference 13 last month are not "most" people. "Rationing of alcohol purchases -- limiting the amount individuals can buy in a given time-period -- has also been used as a means of regulating availability," Robin Room noted at "Alcohol Policy Conference 13." Room's presentation was titled "Preventing alcohol problems: Popular approaches are ineffective, effective approaches are politically impossible."
The "Alcohol Policy" conference series brings together all the anti-alcohol warriors funded by the notoriously neo-prohibitionist Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Of course, RWJF foots the bill for this anti-alcohol love-fest as well.
Join Together Online, a news website funded by RWJF, reported that a booth at the conference, hosted by an alcohol industry group, "elicited grumbles from many attendees," but readers were assured that "at least the staff was isolated from the conference halls, where the industry was repeatedly hammered by speakers for allegedly marketing their products to youth, alcoholics, and binge drinkers." The article quotes conference participants like the belligerently anti-alcohol David Jernigan of the Center for Alcohol Marketing and Youth, and George Hacker of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, whose antics earned him a "Nanny Award" from the Center for Consumer Freedom in 1999.
A conference press release recommended "raising the cost of alcohol through increases in alcohol taxes" and "limiting alcohol sales outlets and hours and conditions of alcohol sales." But the Center for Consumer Freedom was inside the conference halls, and some of what we heard was even worse. For example, Tom Babor of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine argued:
"If your ultimate objective is to reduce consumption...alcohol education doesn't seem to have made much of a difference...[it] may not be directly related to our ultimate goal which is to reduce consumption."
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