• iriyan@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      Anthopology has provided clear evidence, in all times, in all tribes and continents, the percentage of people that will abuse substances that affect the mind has been steady, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, they will find the substance in the wilderness if it is not in the market.

      Alternatively both politically and economically certain entities will use this weakness to control and manipulate people, either by promoting one, or by criminalizing another. Miami became big and important during prohibition because politicians would travel down there to drink and … whatever else they needed. Bootlegging lasted twice or more after prohibition was reverted, mostly because industrial production wasn’t there to cover the need/market.

      Opium smoking was common in Europe among the elites all the way to early 20th century. The poor just smoked cheaper stuff.

      The WHO are hypocrites than need to hang high and dry

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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        5 days ago

        nothing anyone can do about it

        Hmm, thought folks had rougher times getting sober when e.g. living in a tent on the street surrounded by addicts vs. when safely and happily housed

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          The vast majority of homeless in the US historically has been women with children (not and but with) who were not substance abusers. The image of being homeless because of substance abuse was right-wing/neo-liberal propaganda to shift blame to the victims. And just like their spiritual father Goebels said, throw mud and some of it will stick (for generations I might add). The way the image was reinforced was because sub.abusers were more visible, declining shelters when available, or safer out of site places. So people actually saw what they were told. When you see a woman with a cart full of stuff and a kid or two following her on the street you don’t identify her as homeless, the sub.abuser laying down in a carton box you do.

        • iriyan@lemmy.ml
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          4 days ago

          You don’t need an ad, or a warning of the risks, you know it is there for the past 50+ years and the right guy that sells it. Just like prozac or ritalin, if you can afford the prescription

          • Petter1@lemm.ee
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            4 days ago

            Has this comment any relevance to mine, or is that the joke because mine didn’t? 🫨

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              It is hard to tell because your comment can’t hardly be related to anything or understood within the discussion … so don’t complain on top

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        5 days ago

        So we should be researching safer psychoactive drugs that don’t affect the body as much /s

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      3 days ago

      You can’t advertise alcohol on the TV in my country. Only exception is beer.

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      There hasn’t been an ad for alcohol on US TV for decades and this had no effect, other than saving alcohol industries for wasting money competing with each other in that area.

      • CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.ee
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        5 days ago

        What? They can’t drink in ads they absolutely still advertise alcohol on television. Its also on a ton of billboards.

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        3 days ago

        “I love football on tv, shots of Gina Lee, hangin’ with my friends, and twins.” …something-something “and I love you too. It’s the love song!”

        -Alcohol ads used to have the best jingles.

        • iriyan@lemmy.ml
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          Because you see ads today that means they were always there? Isn’t there any basic train of thought anymore, is everyone now living in still pictures? Why are so many people here denying the article I provided earlier where it was saying that NBC after “50” years it begun having liquor ads again.

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            " Isn’t there any basic train of thought anymore…"

            No, ads, television, and social media destroyed our attention spans.

            Now the only tv ads that play are Lawyer ads, Insurance ads, and Pharmaceutical Ads. By comparison, Alcohol ads coming back doesn’t seem half-bad.

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        Australian sports fields are covered in alcohol logos So the entire time you are watching football with your children, they are exposed

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          What is the legal drinking age in Aus? When the Kuwait war started there were kids sent to fight in an unheard land before, and they did and some came back and still couldn’t drink legally in the US. You can drive at 16, on a mandatory draft you could be drafted as young as 16, but you have to be 21 to drink and 18 to buy cigarettes. You can sell crack and crystal-meth on the streets, illegal weapons, flesh, easy when you are 15, but you have to pay a homeless drunk to buy you wine or a pack of Camels.

          That is your free market hypocrisy at work.

          How else can I explain it, there are millions of children dying because of food and water shortages, but WHO thinks alcohol labels will benefit peoples’ health …
          Somebody get us some rope …

          • jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml
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            2 days ago

            I agree that there are much bigger problems, but those bigger problems have solutions that are not allowed under capitalism and USA imperialism, so labels is all we’re allowed to fix 🤷

            The legal drinking age in Australia is 18 years old, and it has always struck me as odd that it’s so high in the USA

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              Kids in the US not only abuse alcohol more than any other place in the channel they are used as traffickers for illegal substances due to their less severe criminal treatment. Of course this weight is carried by the lower economic class. In anonymous interviews there was consensus though, it was easier for them to get drugs and guns than alcohol and cigarettes. That’s because they had to pay an adult to get it for them, because they are selling everything else.

              All this is a structural part of stability of capitalism as you very well state. Unfortunately the formula of that stability is imposed on all other “dependent” states, and in some cases in extremes (Brazil, Phillipines, …).

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          US beer can hardly qualify as control substance, it is what alcoholics drink to reduce the alcohol on their blood. The rest of alcohol has been banned for decades. Imagine that when Amstel first seriously started selling in the US standard Amstel couldn’t classify as beer but only liquor, amstel light did meet the criteria. Now this is tv and radio, other media did have ads.

          Tobacco bans mostly hurt motorsports but soon they found alternatives to cover the market.

          • QualifiedKitten@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            Per your original comment:

            There hasn’t been an ad for alcohol on US TV for decades

            Beer is alcohol. Beer is still advertised on US TV. Everything you’ve said just comes across as a bad faith attempt to redirect the argument.

            • iriyan@lemmy.ml
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              What I am saying is that all the ad restrictions hadn’t had an effect to really decrease alcohol consumption.

              Redirect what argument, that WHO decided to waste more billions of financing to pretend they are doing something beyond stating the obvious? Why don’t we go back a few years and see what WHO did to assist and hash propaganda about covid originating in China and other myths without ever going back and dismissing the myths when clear evidence came out that it was all political propaganda fabrications.

              The WHO is just like the UN, it sells the middle class of the western world some assurance that funding is going to organizations looking up for humanities best interests.

              And who are we to discuss whether this dumb unscientific proposal has any value? Nobody asked us, it is just tax money being funneled somewhere for industry to draw legitimacy for their causes when it needs it.

              Drinking is not bad alone, abusing alcohol is, being an alcoholic is bad. What would tags do to alocoholics? You can put a live screen showing them their own liver turning to plaster and they will still empty the bottle.

              Meanwhile there are hundreds of thousands of people dying from simple curable diseases, kids dying, some dying simply from thirst for clean water or basic nutrient deficiencies. WHO is proposing to put warning on 50yo Cognac bottles.

          • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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            5 days ago

            Holy. I’ve never seen such a perfect example of moving goalposts before.
            I’m impressed.

            • iriyan@lemmy.ml
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              If you don’t understand something in specific ask me to explain it. Summary: The WHO are a bunch of hypocrites serving big-pharma interests and feeding propaganda We have more important things to discuss than what WHO does or doesn’t when we will never be asked by WHO on our opinion or whether we choose to support those nobodies. For decades US-TV wasn’t showing alcohol ads, no effect. Since I watch no tv or US sports, I wouldn’t know they begun showing them again. During the decades I watched tv (star-trek NG, taxi, cheers, mork&mindy,SNL) there were never alcohol commercials.
              Cigarette labeled packs with horror pics and messages in EU had no effect, but socially pressuring people to quit smoking had a dramatic increase in anti-depressant medication. CIgarettes in the EU all look alike now, less than 10% of the box is left for brand/color/label etc. Nobody pays attention to what the box says.
              Italian hospitals first, then French, came out saying they had deaths with symptoms and went back to stored blood samples and were positive for SARS-cov2 … 2months before the first case in China. The Who was still saying that the evidence on where in China the virus originated were inconclusive. They are still publishing reports on covid based on data that only a handful of countries are still providing. They are the joke of the health sector. Big-Pharma must have cut their bribes down and they are seeking bribes from Alcohol companies.

              • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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                5 days ago

                You need something better to do with your time than type out a bunch of nonsense no one is going to read.

                Everyone has told you multiple times you are flat out wrong about tv ads. Suck it up and move on.

                • Doug Holland@lemmy.world
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                  Factcheck: Everyone hasn’t told @iriyan@lemmy.ml that they’re flat out wrong about TV ads. I haven’t had my turn yet.

                  @iriyan@lemmy.ml, you are flat out wrong about TV ads for alcoholic beverages in the USA. I’m cheerfully hoisting an adult beverage soon as I’ve posted this, “as seen on TV.”

                • iriyan@lemmy.ml
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                  https://web.archive.org/web/20220123110138/https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2014/03/alcohol-advertising-ad-placement-self-regulation

                  Am I making this up?

                  What media can safely say 71% of the audience is over 21? A scary movie? Something with explicit sex, what, because that is what teens will run and watch.

                  Federal and local courts went head to head about alcohol advertising in the 90s and targeting teens (or under aged drinkers 21 in the US since early 1980s). Remember Coors nearly going bankrupt, or Camel being attacked because of their camel cartoon character ads? Superficial hypocritical measures that only lawyers and insurance companies can appreciate.

                  The division between beer and malt-liquor/liquor in the US is very specific to US regulation that separates beer from liquor. From state to state to sell liquor beer and wine may be separate licenses.

                  Did any of this have an impact in reducing under 21 addiction, mortality, DUI rates? NO!!

  • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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    Got nuts, but if you’re worried about people drinking to much work on making it easier to get by as working class. The shorter lifespan is just less getting crushed by the weight of my living expenses.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      Surely shaming people and making them feel bad for their choices will work this time, not just cause more animosity in the world. People with drinking problems usually do so to escape something, to bad we can fix those underlying issues.

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    Wow! Finally! 🎉🎉 It’s astonishing that it took so many decades. We knew, we always knew that alcohol causes cancer. Now we also know that the risk is significant from any amount. And of course, it’s not just cancer.

    Those labels, they really work. Like, the society to big extend quit smoking thanks to those labels.

    Policies curbing smoking weren’t popular at the time, people criticized them for being too much of an inconvenience and ineffective at the same time. But they really worked and our society became better and healthier because of them. Funny, how watching the debate about alcohol now, reading people’s comment here, you can actually relive this experience now just years later. When people say “they should focus on X instead”, and things like that, that’s a form of denialism

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      Those labels, they really work.

      So would images of dog extrement.

      Turns out, slapping /b/-grade traumatic imagery onto consumer goods has an impact on the human brain. Whoda thunkit?

  • can@sh.itjust.works
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    Yes please. Sick of the double standard. Can’t buy flavoured nicotine anymore but can still buy sickeningly flavoured liquor.

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      It’s poison, quite literally. State sponsored leathal posion. But it makes money and it’s legal, so it’s very cool.

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          I didn’t say they should make it illegal. But stip being hypocrits about it. They still need studies to legalize marijuana, because there isn’t enough data for it to be save and jada jada. Okay, but we have more than enough data that shows just how bad and dangerous both alcohol and cigarettes are.

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          yes it will, it will criminalize the poor while there will be more profitable legal alternatives for the rich …

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    6 days ago

    We should be actively warning about and discouraging the consumption of demerit goods. Alcohol, cigarettes, vapes, SSBs, ultra processed food all completely destroy the health of communities all around the world. Not just in the States, but also in both developed and developing countries. We’ve seen study after study after study that these do nothing but make us addicted to slop that shortens our lifespan and makes us unhappy.

    But the organization that is offering this advice cannot even act in the 3rd largest country in the world by population because of “”“misinformation”“” from covid.

    WHO basically fully prevented the Ebola outbreak in Nigeria, and it did not affect my parents. If WHO didn’t act, I probably wouldn’t be alive right now. To think that people genuinely think that leaving it is good goes against every line of thinking I have used in my entire life.

  • iz_ok@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    The alcohol lobby is pretty strong in the US. Good thing we dropped out of WHO. Now we can poison ourselves in peace.

    • iriyan@lemmy.ml
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      The father of history I believe 4th century BC writes about some Greek mercenaries returning from an expedition in Persia, where one brother wanted his brother killed so he can become the king of Persia, and while walking North they came up on an #Armenian town where they were given food and shelter. He describes the hosts having some large ceramic containers with wine and “straws”, where each drunk from the container.

      Alcohol is pretty old, and so is its abuse. There is a difference though when a community collectively make wine for their own consumption and pleasure, and an industry mass producing something with toxic chemical additives to preserve and modify taste/flavor, and have an interest in “pushing” it to a larger and larger market. Same with drugs, and just about anything else. Just examine a woman’s shampoo commercial, the movement, the background, the joy, of using it and tell me they are not resembling the experience to an LSD trip. The woman sudenly is out of her ugly apartment in smokey Chicago in the middle of winter and is running in slow motion in a field full of flowers in the sun, with colors flashing everywhere, her smiling with no reason … purple haze …

      Reforming capitalism to be humane and environmentally friendly is just as much an illusion as it is toxic as a political agenda. It is not possible. You can’t just slap warning label on grenades and then hand them off to kids to go play, then ask them to ship to Iraq to kill natives for the good of their “country”. It is too risky to sell anti-inflamatory medication without prescription but it is ok to be paid 1/3 of what a marketing associate makes to go and repare lines during a hurricane … because the elec.company needs to keep its record up of providing service 99.99% of the time. Or its stock price may drop!

      WHO needs to go work on ebola epidemics and contain them, but also work on hunger, thirst, bacteria in wells and creeks, shelter, children vaccination, and stop teasing alcohol and tobacco companies for bribes and pocket support.

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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    Isn’t this already common knowledge? No one is drinking alcohol because they think it’s good for you.

    People: drink alcohol to help them survive being exploited under capitalism

    WHO: “best I can do is tell you that you’re going to die sooner”

    Also, I don’t know if anyone’s researched this, but I’m 99% sure the stress chemicals your body generates from being a wage slave and living paycheck to paycheck your entire life are far more carcinogenic than alcohol. Maybe that should come with a label too.

    • sebb@lemmy.ml
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      The facts are alcohol doesn’t help anyone to survive shit. We know that it’s the opposite, it makes life of people that consume it more miserable.

      It instead accumulates together with the stress you experience within your life. It adds more stress, not removes it. Cancer is just one thing, but alcohol is very disrupting to your endocrine (hormones) system, mental health.

      What you’re doing is a form of denialism. That denialism comes precisely from what those labels are addressing. You’re being constantly exposed to the image of alcohol as something to enjoy, a pleasure, relief. It’s constantly reinforced by movies, TV shows, media, advertisements.

      It’s not about knowledge. It’s about exposure. If you’re constantly exposed to an image of alcohol as a positive thing in your life then you will deny it’s impact despite the facts, science, and knowledge

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        The facts are alcohol doesn’t help anyone to survive shit

        Hard disagree… I did it just last night.

        Not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic.

        • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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          Not all problems from alcohol come from alcoholism.

          There was a thought process that alcohol could apply some health benefits below a certain consumption level.

          It has been now accepted that there is no “safe” amount of alcohol.

            • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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              Alcohol did help people survive in the past.

              Beer was a very common way to create a potable water source in the past and provided calories that could be preserved over time.

              Nowadays, the use of alcohol as a preservative isn’t necessary. A reevaluation of alcohol in all its forms in the modern context shows that it causes a net harm to health, even at low volumes.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      There were a bunch of lies published by alcohol industry-backed groups about how a glass of red wine is good for your heart and shit. It probably would be helpful to bust those shitty myths.

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      I may not live in Nebraska, and haven’t been there for years, but living in a relatively active agricultural country in Europe, nearly 90% of food in the grocery store is now owned by US subsidiaries. When I first came I remember experts bragging that GMOs will never be allowed or enter the EU. Now Monsanto is a native EU corporation, based in Germany with the excuse Bayer (ex Nazi corporation) bought Monsanto, not the other way around. Being so large now, together with BASF and a couple of other giants, you think politicians in Germany will stop them and turn against them, and what becomes OK in Germany is mandated all over the EU. Then we have the leading laboratory of hybrids and GMOs called the Netherlands who make tulips smell like onions and onions smelling like roses, and garlic looking like an apple.

      The whole world is so doomed because of capitalism nobody has a clue anymore what we can do and how it will ever stop.

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      6 days ago

      California tried that with their prop 65 warnings on everything and it just made people ignore all the label warnings instead.

      So no, we should only target the worst offenders.

    • iriyan@lemmy.ml
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      Please correct this, not all of your food, all of the food sold by industrial outfits, even as bio-organic industrial products. If there is one place in the planet you can live without this it is the US, plenty of land, few people, plenty of resources to afford healthy nutrition. Compare it with hell holes like the Netherlands that have higher population density than Queens NY and there is not a square inch left to grow anything to eat, let alone in an artificial dried up swamp toxins have no means of draining off.

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    4 days ago

    Ehhhhhh alcohol is nowhere near as dangerous as cigarettes. The point of labelling cigarettes is that they’re so exceptional dangerous.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      Cigarette danger isn’t the benchmark for labelling cancer risk. The health risks from cigarettes have justified a lot more government intervention than just a label.

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          I just assume anyone with that take is an alcoholic. I’ve never seen anyone go to rehab for cigarettes or in the hospital for over dosing on nicotine. They both have terrible long term effects mostly related to heart health. However alcohol has more immediate negative consequences.

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    5 days ago

    We are daily bombarded with news on what the ruling elites have decided to enforce and that it affects our living, yet instead of concentrating on the mechanism we split hair between us on whether we are for or against their decisions. Nobody is left being concerned on what it would be like for us to announce our decisions that would affect their lives.

    There is no talk here whether we should act to prevent this or not, just whether we approve or disapprove their actions. The motive? Our disapproval has little if any effect on them, they will keep deciding, they will enforce, and we will comply, because we know no other way.

    I say we change the agenda, stop making their news headlines our center for discussion, let’s keep focusing on our headlines, till they start addressing our agenda.

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        This is the shittiest most fascist behavior anyone can utilize to avoid criticism and exposure. Delete the original post in where there is live discussion with more users than any thread on this miserable medium that allows people like swampwitch to behave like this.

        So ignorant and aggressive it should be forbidden, as soon as a comment is posted posts can’t be removed. Once information is public who does anyone think that is private property and can remove it from the public sphere? Not even facebook twitter and the likes of corporate fascists don’t act the way fediverse actors act. Total punks!

        • swampwitch@lemmy.world
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          Just figured it wasn’t as relevant as it could be. It was just me mentioning that I think it’s fine to push this sort of change due to being influenced by family working in the ICU seeing cases of alcoholism and alcohol-influenced accidents. However, I am from the UK, which has a higher rate of alcoholism than other nations.

          Didn’t think me figuring “eh, nah” would be seen as some sort of heinous micro-aggression.

          • iriyan@lemmy.ml
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            I am sorry for over-reacting on something so common, but I feel very strongly about such things. If I write something, post a picture of an alien, print some data and publish them, they are no longer my private property, they are public. I shouldn’t have the right to take it away, especially when people used it as a base to discuss that object, despite of its value. It also adds to the confusion, a third person comes by wondering what’s wrong with those that made a comment on something that doesn’t exist.

            We should encourage discussion, we should fight those who prevent it. For ages we shut passively in front of a tube receiving and not being able to react or discuss. One way brainwashing without the sound of resistance. Now we can screen out everything by discussion, and each can judge what is right and wrong, what sounds rational and what is.

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              I am honestly incredibly grateful for the NHS and find it bizarre that anyone can be actively against nationalised healthcare. I can’t imagine how many people have died due to simply not wanting to burden their family with excessive bills.

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                4 days ago

                Most people can’t think they can only reproduce propaganda. No sense in debating with parrots. Many people in the US advocates of health care, keep saying “in Europe they have this and that”, no most countries in Europe have/had state sponsored health “insurance” which is very different than socialized health care. So a government administed fund pays for health care, even the one provided by state owned hospitals. Service, product, by product, billed, charged, and paid. Huge administration cost, huge corruption possibilities, all you do is provide the ones with authority to accept the charge and the commission is paid. Brits fought literally in a war against government before ww2 to get this and they got it. The rest fought in a variable degree to get something so they got less. Sweden and Finland being the showcase of capitalism against the SU got something then, quickly begun to have it dismantled after 1990. So the last few socialized health care systems are the NHS, Cuba’s health care, (#2 highest health indicators in the Americas after Canada) … and the US armed forces, which is also being chewed and dismantled and converting to an insurance model. US mil and dependents just showed an ID and got health services, exams, medicine, operations, nothing charged anywhere, just working people serving working people. Such hypocrisy, where capital really needed health care to be effective they adopted a pure socialist model.

                Einstein said “the universe and human stupidity are the only known infinite quantities, and I am not really sure about the universe”.

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    5 days ago

    Is there a way to trace big-pharma money to WHO decision makers? Have there been any reports on discovering such “flow”?

    Isn’t it obvious that all “medical advise” on addictive legal substances is pressure on a huge market to shift to psychotropic medication for which profitability is 100s of times more controllable?

    The more they squeeze the population (nearly 30%) away from cigs, alcohol, and street drugs, the more they gain in anti-depressants. And there seems no effort what so ever to squeeze the street drug addict population away from anything, seriously!

    The WHO just wants a piece of the pie, and the more they act like this the more likely you will see the US becoming best friends with WHO elite again. So the blackmail worked!

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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      If you learn more about the effects of alcohol, it is arguably as bad as, if not worse than, cigarettes or marijuana. Ethanol is literally poison that damages liver, and it impedes with the electrical signals between brain cells. The Temperance movement had a point to ban alcohol.

      The only reason we are not going to ban alcohol again, is because banning it had proven to have more dire consequences. Gangsters took monopoly of the black market. And tainting black market alcohol to deter people from drinking alcohol is dangerous, just as bootleggers also made their own alcohol but the process is unregulated.

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        Gangsters took monopoly of the black market

        There seems to be some percent of the population in every geography of the planet living, working, survivng as part of this army, contra-band. They are the most vicious supporters of capitalism because they can’t survive outside of capitalism. They are as right wing as it gets, and due to their activity they are constantly in contact and exchange relationships with state armed forces.

        Capitalism can not survive without this reactionary army, terrorizing people in worker/poor neighborhoods to not organize and compete with their power, and will act as supporters of police/army in case there was an uprising.
        Capitalism can not survive without this para-military force of gangsters, thugs, traffickers, smugglers, mafia, neo-nazis, islamists, … you change geography and they have a different name, but the role is the same. In the 1960s in the US they became so actively brutal it was almost revealed that there was no clear border between state agencies and mafia … who was doing the killing, the infiltrating, the subversions, … they got sloppy! Too much evidence behind.

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    What I’ve learned over the past five years is that you have to be very careful with this kind of mandate, or it will make people despise and doubt your whole organization. I actually think that this kind of warning label will increase the amount of cancer people get, because they’ll start smoking cigarettes again, which are much worse.

    Edit: To clarify, the reason people would start smoking cigarettes is not because it’s an alternative to alcohol; it’s because they would lose faith in health and safety warnings altogether. It’s stupid, but people are stupid.

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      You will not get very far with calling people stupid. It takes months sometimes for me to have a glass of beer or wine, and very rarely anything stronger, I don’t need it, never liked the feeling of having too much of it.

      When I lose my concentration and trying hard to figure something out half a cigarette make my mind work again … I don’t think it is the nicotine though, because vaping with high content of nicotine did nothing other than keeping me from going outside to smoke. I wouldn’t generalize though because the effects can be different for different people, even with tea. I can drink 20 cups of coffee a day, and fall asleep with half a cup next to my pillow, I can drink chamomile and some other herbal teas they say they relax and calm you down, and I’ll be up all night. Black tea has a higher hit than caffeine for me, maybe my caffeine blood content never drops low enough to notice :)

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        You will not get very far with calling people stupid.

        On the contrary. This is why most companies try to make their UXs foolproof. It’s the general wisdom of engineers to assume that the user is stupid. It is this sense in which I mean “people are stupid,” not something directed at anyone in particular.

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          Once in a while both bosses and obedient puppets branded engineers pay the price of their false assumptions. I suspect the reason users, not companies, are increasingly engaged in using and contributing to linux/unix/BSDs is because “corporate engineers” treated people as being stupid.

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            Oh I agree. I wish software was not so dumbed down these days. Still, you have to admit they’ve gotten pretty far, as it were.

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      6 days ago

      Has smoking and drinking ever been an exclusive or decision for people? I never smoked and wouldn’t have traded drinking for it, as I consider smoking completely disgusting. The effects are also very different.

      The bigger issue is that drug laws regarding legality of a substance are completely detached from scientific reality, leaving people with no alternatives but some of the more dangerous substances for recreative use.

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        Smoking became disgusting when the campain against smoking became effective. In previous decades when people smoked more nobody ever called smoking disgusting. We haven’t evolved that much since the 70s/80s. So what many people perceive as a disgusting habbit today is the effect of conditioning and propaganda. Smokers also had long lasting relations with non-smokers, now it is unthinkable a smoker and a non-smoker to even go out for a coffee together.

        I am also surprised this discussion has gone so far so long and nobody has mentioned sugar and its bi-products (soft drinks, candy, sweets, …) Is there such an addiction recognized and known as dangerous? Type-B diabetes has become common even for kids, especially in the west. The sweetest thing you will find in China doesn’t even taste sweet, and if you offer a middle eastern pastry to a Chinese person they put half a spoon in their mouth and think they are about to die.

        Super-Size it PLEASE!!!

        • Laser@feddit.org
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          Smoking became disgusting when the campain against smoking became effective.

          Bullshit. My non-smoking parents called smoking disgusting in the 80s and probably before that. It became disgusting when addicts smoked everywhere without consideration for others, like in restaurants or on trains.

          So what many people perceive as a disgusting habbit today is the effect of conditioning and propaganda. Smokers also had long lasting relations with non-smokers, now it is unthinkable a smoker and a non-smoker to even go out for a coffee together.

          The fuck are you on about? I have no problem doing stuff with smokers and have had nobody ever claiming otherwise. Just don’t smoke in a way that affects me.

          I am also surprised this discussion has gone so far so long and nobody has mentioned sugar and its bi-products (soft drinks, candy, sweets, …) Is there such an addiction recognized and known as dangerous?

          Nice whataboutism. Btw, as far as I know, the same bodies pushing for regulating smoking and drinking more are also in favor of addressing this issue. And now matter how relevant it might be, your just detailing here.

          Type-B diabetes has become common even for kids, especially in the west.

          Sorry, I know types 1 and 2 only.

          The sweetest thing you will find in China doesn’t even taste sweet, and if you offer a middle eastern pastry to a Chinese person they put half a spoon in their mouth and think they are about to die.

          Which China?

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            2 days ago

            There is only one, the Peoples’ Repuplic of China, the other is just a violent invasion and occupation by the US the Taiwanese people have endured.

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        I didn’t mean to imply that smoking and drinking were mutually exclusive, nor that one is an alternative to the other. I meant that people would be surprised by seeing these labels on alcohol, and then start to doubt all health-and-safety-related labels, then deduce that cigarettes must not be that bad.

        Please note that I think this is poor logic, as I do think alcohol is unhealthy. I merely predict this response from people overall.

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        Scientifically we are not equal in this respect, most studies show during all ages and populations on earth there is a specific percent of the population that needs substances to control behavior. Whether it is smoking opium, sniffing coke, drinking wine, or injecting anti-depressants there are those born with a tendency to find such escape.

        In the age where industry X can patent substance Y and sell it at 10000xcost … there will be a motive for making competitor substances look bad.

        • CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.ee
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          Did you just compare anti-depressants to sniffing coke? or are you referring to people doing anti-depressants recreationally?

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            The only coke that is legally imported to the US is a subsidiary front of Coca-Cola supervised by a USAF agency. After processing part of the product goes to the sole soft drink manufacturer the rest goes to big-Pharma

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            5 days ago

            I am referring to people who can NOT do without behavior modification substances, legal, illegal, off the mini-market or the drug-store or the street, it makes no difference.

            YES it is all over the literature, anti-depressants took up the slack of smoking and drinking quitting markets. From Big-Tobacco to Big-Pharma the goal is profit, and Prozac is one hell of alot more profitable than a good cigar. From Delaware to Georgia you have to use chemicals to stop tobacco from growing or use hybrids that are incapable of reproducing. Even if you can make Prozac in your kitchen you can’t sell someone’s patent.

        • Laser@feddit.org
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          You need to read this in the context of the post I replied to. I don’t doubt what you’re saying. But there was an implication that for some people, alcohol was the “healthier alternative” to smoking that they’re now not using but instead smoke (which is supposed to be even less healthy, personally I can’t rank their impact on health on a good foundation but this is what was implied).

          I know people self-medicate and that others use recreationally. But I’m sure alcohol and tobacco industry don’t give a fuck about the legality of the other. If anything, there’s probably a synergy.

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            5 days ago

            I am not a chemist but one high up in the chem-health research chain was telling me the basic ingredient on most popular “energy” drinks is a slightly modified chain of usual methamphetamines that is not banned by FDA or Euro-equivalent agencies, and in it reacts with alcohol to produce the effects now known to kids all around the world.

            There is no dirtier pusher than Big-Pharma and Big-Tobacco… The crap is so evil it resembles 30-40s German “industries” like the Bayer-nazis now part of Monsanto.

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                5 days ago

                So you must be a biochemist, in which case you would have no problem explaining to us lesser mortals how different the formulas are and how unrelated they are.
                You would also by the topic know exactly in which journals to search and find whether this is far-fetched or not, and you have access to them when the rest of us have to pay. If you are not even close to that field to tell how can you be so sure to put it mildly?

                Do you know how many scientific findings are right there, published, but millions are paid so media do not make “common sense” out of them?

                What is wrong and so special about kids in the US that such a high percentage require ritalin? Why not the kids of the rest of the world? What are the side-effects of long term ritalin addiction?

                At least tobacco takes decades to kill you but will keep your mind sharp if you need it.

                • Laser@feddit.org
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                  There are just so many holes in that theory that I don’t believe it, biochemist or not.

                  First and unrelated to any biochemical processes being that you claim that “it reacts with alcohol to produce the effects now known to kids all around the world”. But kids for sure don’t mix these with alcohol, the discussion here was always about marketing the drinks to kids while they have caffeine and high sugar. Not that they mix it with alcohol.

                  Second, at least for other previously legal substances that evaded existing laws that I read into, molecules were attached to existing substances (e.g. 1p-LSD) which in the body lost the attached molecule. However, the companies producing these had to handle LSD, and for that had a license. If this approach was used here, the energy drink companies would need to have licenses to handle methamphetamine and its predecessors.

                  Third, most chemical reactions are a bit more complicated than “just add ethanol”.

                  Lastly, it was you who made an unsubstantiated claim and, citing Hitchen’s razor, “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”.

                  At least tobacco takes decades to kill you but will keep your mind sharp if you need it.

                  Are you implying tobacco is less bad for your brain than amphetamines?

                  After his mother’s death in 1971 he started taking antidepressants and amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking them for a month. Erdős won the bet but complained that it impacted his performance: “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his use of Ritalin and Benzedrine.

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős#Personality

                  Not that I’m recommending this.