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.

[robertpaulsen]

"an amendment empowering federal criminalization of drugs was never passed."

Now this is news. An amendment must exist first before another amendment can reverse it? Surely you're not series?

You brought up the proposition. I say pass an amendment if you want drugs, just like the 21st amendment was passed by those who wanted alcohol.

[MrLeRoy]

I realize you have no heart for the truth.

I think he has no patients for the trolling of irrelevant truths.

[headsonpikes]

"The thread is prohibition."

It most certainly is.

You Native American Totalitarians with your Prohibition and your propagandistic public schools and your lawyer-driven Courts will never learn until the whole rotten structure collapses on your socialist heads.

Prohibition. Shove it sideways.

And twist.

[MrLeRoy]

An amendment must exist first before another amendment can reverse it? Surely you're not series?

An amemdment may be the chosen way to reverse a constitutional law; it is a travesty to suggest one for an unconstitutional law.

[B. Rabbit]

I say pass an amendment if you want drugs, just like the 21st amendment was passed by those who wanted alcohol.

Should we also have to pass an ammendment if we want to "allow" the sale of SUVs for private use?

Should we pass an ammendment if we want to allow the use of mustard on hot dogs for that matter?

What about an ammendment for homosexual sex?

[tacticalogic]

I realize you have no heart for the truth.

Don't confuse "heart for truth" with "time for trolls". Your bait stinks. Try it on somebody else.

[johnb838]

I don't see why acohol shouldn't be the most regulated mind-altering substance around. I can't think of any drug more dangerous except maybe PCP.

[cinFLA]

You Native American Totalitarians with your Prohibition and your propagandistic public schools and your lawyer-driven Courts will never learn until the whole rotten structure collapses on your socialist heads. Prohibition. Shove it sideways.

Then why is it that the druggies on this board pull out socialist prohibitionist Sam Farr from California as an icon of "progressiveness"????????????????????????

[cinFLA]

You Native American Totalitarians

YOU HAVE NO BASIS FOR THIS CLAIM!

[tacticalogic]

I didn't know you had a pro-druggie.

I didn't even know I had an amateur-druggie. Maybe he's living in the spare dog house. I'll check when I get home.

[MrLeRoy]

the druggies on this board pull out socialist prohibitionist Sam Farr from California as an icon of "progressiveness"

Yet another of your many, many lies.

[robertpaulsen]

"protected from social ostracism?"

Oh, please. Social ostracism -- since when, the 50's? In today's society, if it's not illegal, it's Ok to do. bassmaner knows this and so do you.

And don't you dare pass judgement on a legal activity -- who do you think you are?

[cinFLA]

Yet another of your many, many lies.

Not. If fact a thread was started with an article about him!

[MrLeRoy]

In today's society, if it's not illegal, it's Ok to do. bassmaner knows this and so do you.

I don't know it---in fact, I seem to see a growing ostracism of tobacco smokers.

[MrLeRoy]

the druggies on this board pull out socialist prohibitionist Sam Farr from California as an icon of "progressiveness"

Yet another of your many, many lies.

Not. If fact a thread was started with an article about him!

Even if that were true, it is laughably far from "pulling him out as an icon."

[jmc813]

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

I'm anti-RWJF because of their communitarian agenda (i.e. Gun Control, funding the idiotic commercials from the PDFA, telling me they know what's best for me such as is indicated in this article, etc.). It reminds me of the attitudes of some FReepers I know, who will go nameless.

[jmc813]

Instead of bringing up libertarians and marijuana, which are not mentioned in this article, why don't you stick with the main jist of the article which is alcohol?

[tpaine]

the pursuit of happiness [is]
"More like "the selfish and irresponsible pursuit of immoral behavior."
-rp-

See #11. -- You are the perfect example of:

---- "The utterly insufferable arrogance of power, and the need for it, is an absolute fact of the human condition. -- Nothing can be done about it. - Just as the poor shall always be with us, so shall we have these infinitely shrewd imbeciles who live to lay down their version of 'the law' to others."

[jmc813]

Social ostracism -- since when, the 50's? In today's society, if it's not illegal, it's Ok to do.

Might I humbly suggest you take a look at some homosexuality and/or abortion threads here on FR.

[jmc813]

Oops! #57 was intended for cinFLA.