Behind The Neo-Prohibition Campaign

The Center for Consumer Freedom ^ | April 17, 2003 | Dan Mindus

[WaterDragon]

America’s anti-alcohol movement is composed of dozens of overlapping community groups, research institutions, and advocacy organizations, but they are brought together and given direction by one entity: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Based in Princeton, New Jersey, the RWJF has spent more than $265 million between 1997 and 2002 to tax, vilify, and restrict access to alcoholic beverages. Nearly every study disparaging alcohol in the mass media, every legislative push to limit marketing or increase taxes, and every supposedly “grassroots” anti-alcohol movement was conceived and coordinated at the RWJF’s headquarters. Thanks to this one foundation, the U.S. anti-alcohol movement speaks with one voice.

For the RWJF, it is an article of faith that diminishing per capita consumption across the board can contain the social consequences of alcohol abuse. Therefore, it has engaged in a long-term war to reduce overall drinking by all Americans. The RWJF relentlessly audits its own programs, checking to see if each dollar spent is having the maximum impact on reducing per capita consumption. Over the past 10 years, this blueprint has been refined. Increased taxes, omnipresent roadblocks, and a near total elimination of alcohol marketing are just a few of the tactics the RWJF now employs in its so-called “environmental” approach.

The environmental approach seeks to shift blame from the alcohol abuser to society in general (and to alcohol providers in particular). So the RWJF has turned providers into public enemy number one, burdening them with restrictions and taxes to make their business as difficult and complex as possible. The environmental approach’s message to typical consumers, meanwhile, is that drinking is abnormal and unacceptable. The RWJF seeks to marginalize drinking by driving it underground, away from mainstream culture and public places.

The RWJF funds programs that focus on every conceivable target, at every level from local community groups to state and federal legislation. Every demographic group is targeted: women, children, the middle class, business managers, Hispanics, Blacks, Whites, Native Americans. Every legal means is used: taxation, regulation, litigation. Every PR tactic: grassroots advocacy, paid advertising, press warfare. Every conceivable location: college campuses, sporting events, restaurants, cultural activities, inner cities, residential neighborhoods, and even bars.

The RWJF scored a major victory in 2000 with a federal .08 BAC mandate, and can claim credit for restrictions on alcohol in localities all over the country. But its $265 million has accomplished much more: it has put in place all the elements required for more sweeping change. This includes a vast network of local community organizations, centers for technical support, a compliant press, and a growing body of academic literature critical of even moderate alcohol consumption. The next highly publicized study or angry local movement may now reach the “tipping point” where the RWJF-funded anti-alcohol agenda snowballs into the kind of orchestrated frenzy the tobacco industry knows well.

Click HERE for the complete article.

[WaterDragon]

Even as the tobacco companies were targeted, and now as "fat" is being targeted, an attempt to criminalize the use of alcohol is underway.

[fporretto]

Self-ping for later reading.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com

[bassmaner]

Worth a WOD bump.

Another front in the WOD, harking back to the golden age of Prohibition (1920-1933), coming soon to a tavern near you, courtesy of the harpies at MADD.

[B. Rabbit]

Why do people think that they can control me?

OTOH, why do we allow ourselves to be controlled?

Bah! I can't get high, let me get drunk at least.

DISCLAIMER: For the record, I have never used drugs and do not drink.

[jmc813]

WOD Ping

[jmc813]

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Ping

[cinFLA]

Libertarian Party defends Joycelyn Elders' call to study drug legalization

"Elders is joining a long list of intelligent, reputable Americans who advocate examining drug legalization," noted Dasbach. "Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, conservative commentator William F. Buckley, former Secretary of State George Schultz, and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman are a few of the others. This is no longer a radical idea. It's an idea whose time is coming."

[cinFLA]

Let me see if I have this straight....

Presently you hate the (perceived) focus of prosecuting drug users BUT

you are anti RWJF which is shifting focus to the suppliers!

Huh?

[cinFLA]

Even as the tobacco companies were targeted, and now as "fat" is being targeted, an attempt to criminalize the use of alcohol is underway.

Perhaps you should read again. It says they are shifting focus to the suppliers, not the users. Isn't this what the druggies want? Decriminalization of the use of drugs?

[Wolfie]

...it is an article of faith that diminishing per capita consumption across the board can contain the social consequences...

Hey, works for the Drug War, why not booze?

[Amalie]

Yeah, but the drug war doesn't work either...

[MrLeRoy]

That's the leftist/WOD mantra: "Let's have more of what hasn't worked."

[MrLeRoy]

Presently you hate the (perceived) focus of prosecuting drug users BUT

you are anti RWJF which is shifting focus to the suppliers!

Who was prosecuting alcohol users?

[MrLeRoy]

Even as the tobacco companies were targeted, and now as "fat" is being targeted, an attempt to criminalize the use of alcohol is underway.

It would serve "conservative" pro-WOD drinkers right to have their drug of choice banned, and then as they try to undo the ban to be told, "The same logic that supports relegalization of alcohol supports relegalization of drugs; you don't want that, do you?"

[aristeides]

Anybody got an explanation for the RWJ Foundation's zeal in this cause?

[cinFLA]

We are talking logic. Something beyond your scope.

[tacticalogic]

RWJF sees this as a "health care" issue, and therefore fair game for government control as a means of controlling health care costs. They see gun ownership, "urban sprawl", and mandatory public school education in gay and lesbian "lifestyle" issues the same way.

They advocate "single payer" healthcare, under centralized governemnt control guided by healtcare industry interest groups (them). Their idea of what constitutes "health care" is about as malleable as what Congress considers "commerce".

[tacticalogic]

We are talking logic.

When did that start?

[cinFLA]

Zimmerman (on the medical marijuana scam)

"So, I'm going to take a position here and I know a lot of people will want to ask questions about this later, but the fastest way to get – that we can get to where we're going is as fast as the American people are willing to go there with us. And, that if we try to get too far out ahead of people, we lose our connection to them and our relation to them and our credibility, and we make it more difficult to move them where we want to go, because that's the only way we're going to get to where we want to go. Thank you."

[aristeides]

But it's pretty hard to believe that draconian policies that discourage even moderate drinking would on balance save health costs.