I’m in recovery and ever commercial is “the bold refreshing taste of uncle berry lemon twist vodka. Having a bad day? Drink this. You know you want to. Drink it Michael! please drink responably
Every ad portrays drinking as a party, and your in a pool throwing a beach ball with your friends, and your ex Chrissy finally admits she was wrong. It’s an unrealistically positive. If you drink Tito’s your father in law will finally grow close to you. It’s not Christmas without even Williams egg nog!
There is no safe amount of alcohol to drink. It is like cigarettes, entirely bad for you.
I’m not saying don’t sell it but why is every add for booze being blasted every. Especially to me because the algorithm knows I’m an alcoholic.
How is that legal?
Please drink responsibly? You’re aiming your ads at alcoholics primarily.
It’s like advertising morphine on skid row. You know what you’re doing.
Bit of a shot in the dark, but seems like cigarette companies have lied in front of congress / courts saying cigarettes are healthy / not bad for you and have been caught red handed in their lies.
Big alcohol hasn’t ever done anything that egregious. Everyone knows its not exactly healthy to drink, and Big Alcohol doesn’t seem to have ever argued that. I know there’s the occasional “a glass of red wine is good for your heart” stuff, but they’re also not making any attempt to deny a gallon of wine per day will probably cause cirrhosis, ya know?
Just FYI, the 1 glass a day study didn’t exclude ex alcoholics, so they polluted the zero-glass-a-day group with bad health making the 1-glass-a-day look healthier in comparison.
The study has been redone and it shows that the less alcohol you consume the better it is, no exceptions.
Yeah, in terms of individual health, I have no doubt that avoiding alcohol all together the best bet.
Personally, I subscribe to a flavor of “social lubricant” take on alcohol. That is, being a human and managing all the required social interactions and minor slights, stressors, stigmas, etc is a lot. And alcohol works to turn off some of the parts of the brain most active in social situations. That is to say that alcohol (and/or other mood altering drugs) are bad for the individual, but good for society.
Do need to caveat that take with: there’s a left and a right to what’s acceptable levels of intoxication. I don’t think the world would be better with everyone getting outright shit faced every night, and even a glass every night might be excessive; its easy to fall prey to addiction and that’s undesirable. But also, I don’t think we’d be better off without alcohol all together. I think a couple glasses per week - and not drinking those glasses alone - makes for a healthy enough middle ground.
Alcohol is ranked as society’s most harmful drug, because no, for way too many people it’s not just a few drinks per week in a healthy social setting. It’s also one of the few drugs where you can literally die during withdrawal.
Yup, and I think that’s a symptom of how isolating modern society is (as opposed to the disease society suffers from).
I def do not advocate for drinking alone in any quantity, but I would also never advocate to remove alcohol from society. It feels reasonable to conclude that since every society that’s ever had success at some level has had some form of mind altering substance (usually alcohol) that was consumed recreationally and regularly.
You can’t remove it, its too easy to make. It doesnt need to be advertised though.
Well I mean, why stop at just alcohol ads? I say we ban them all.
^^ Only kinda joking there. I do hate ads, esp those that interrupt whatever content I was involved in (TV, streaming, pop-up). Ones that just kinda set on the side are mostly okay (billboards, banner ads, those pamphlets at hotels, etc).
There’s a good reason we’ve had alcohol for almost as long as we’ve had civilization, and I think you hit on some key points of it here. It’s a social lubricant, many important meetings and decisions of history might not have happened without a little drink to loosen some tongues.
That’s not to say that it’s good for you, but alcohol has been present alongside human evolution in sort of the same way that dogs have. We go waaayyyyyy way back together.
Just adding. The liquor industry has been pushing the ‘drink responsibly’ line for decades. Back in the day they tried to get an AA member to sign on as a spokesperson but AA asked the member not to do it and they agreed.
Alcohol has also just been more prevalent in human cultures dating back to prehistory. Some of the earliest evidence we have of permanent human settlements were breweries, theorized to have been built by people who still lived semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles. That would mean that humans first started making permanent settlements and doing large-scale agriculture only to produce alcohol, and still mainly relied on hunting and gathering for their caloric needs. Other drugs / intoxicants have been used by humans for at least as long, but none have been so central to the development of civilization and culture than alcohol.
Yeah, I could never fly an economy flight without a drink or three to lighten the spirits.
I see what you did there.