Posted on 04/17/2003 1:03:26 AM PDT by 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.
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1. Alcohol consumption is intentional impairment -- indeed there is no other purpose.
2. The impairment is gradual, i.e. there is no 'magic threshold' where, all of a sudden, impairment occurs.
3. While it is true that we (societally) allow other impaired drivers to drive i.e. the elderly and the handicapped, there is nothing comparable to alcohol where we allow individual drivers to intentionally impair their ability to drive and yet do so. It is insane.
4. BTW, if there were a special track (like Autopia at Disneyland) for the drinkers and the drunks, I could care less. They could kill off one another and themselves and improve the gene pool. But, alas, such is not the case. After intentionally impairing themselves, they go right out on the same highways as our wives and children. I have zero sympathy for the poor drunk who 'only' impaired himself 'a little bit'.
A drug user is able to understand the effects of the drug he's about to take and moderate his intake. Or are you suggesting that it's legitimate to ban drugs that can in sufficient quantity render the user unable to prevent himself from committing hazardous acts? If so, which drugs are those, and does the list include alcohol?
You remain the master of the irrelevant reply.
That prohibitionists thought so doesn't make it so.
I am suggesting that there are drugs that it is inappropriate to sell people until they demonstrate an understanding of the effects, or at least inappropriate to sell to people who have demonstrated an inability understand and moderate the effects. If that means we have to license people to buy alcohol, and make that license revokable for a DWI conviction, so be it.
Perhaps you could find a reference which supports your contention?
Perhaps you could find a reference which supports your contention?
I see nothing in the quoted text that requires support.
I contend that the opinion of prohibitionists is insufficient to establish that an amendment was not needed.
Conservatives should note the following about prohibitionists:
'Progressivism and prohibition were, in his [historian James H. Timberlake's] view, closely related middle-class reform movements seeking to deal with social and economic problems through the use of governmental power. They drew on the same broad base of support and moral idealism, and they proposed similar solutions to society's ills. Examinations of temperance campaigns in such varied states as Texas, Washington, Tennessee, New Mexico, Virginia, California, and Missouri support Timberlake's conclusion that "prohibition was actually written into the Constitution as a progressive reform." [...]
'Far more optimistic than the preceding generation about man's capacity to solve problems and mold a satisfactory world, Progressives believed that their goals could be reached by creating the proper laws and institutions. Whether the particular task into which they plunged was raising the quality of life for the urban working class, conserving natural resources, establishing professional societies and standards, improving governmental morality, democracy, and services, or controlling business practices, Progressives repeatedly displayed their unshakable confidence that legal and bureaucratic instruments could be found which would permanently uplift that aspect of their environment.' "They believed," as Ralph H. Gabriel put it, "that man, by using his intellect can re-make society, that he can become the creator of a world organized for man's advantage."'
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