It was bound to come. The made-up ‘safe drinking levels’ have been reduced to new and yet still ‘unsafe’ levels because…
Alcohol is associated with cancers elsewhere and there is generally no safe level.
What a load of cobblers. More invented Puritan rubbish to drive you into a lifestyle that is no life at all.
As with smoking, attributing a rise in all sorts of cancers to something that has been far more prevalent in past years is not only non-science, it is patently ridiculous. As with smoking, if alcohol was the real cause, then the cancers should be declining, not increasing.
That’s not to say that excessive alcohol cannot cause cancer – but excessive alcohol will kill you through liver failure before any cancer gets time to properly develop. Which makes the cancer risk from alcohol somewhat irrelevant, really.
Oh I know all about this ‘there’s a time delay’ rubbish. Anyone with half a brain has noticed that the ‘time delay’ gets longer as the years pass, because the time when people were free to live their lives as they saw fit is getting further into the past.
How do you blame modern childhood illnesses on something that happened in the 1950s or 1960s? Well, you just make them hereditary. Job done.
Reseach your family tree and find out if your great-grandfather once smoked a cigarette and/or drank a shandy. If he did, then frankly, you’re fucked. Might as well order a coffin and book your cemetery plot right now because you’re going to be dead by next year.
Wild exaggeration? Look at what the NHS have been claiming. It’s exactly that!
The NHS are supposed to be there to fix you when you break. That’s what they were set up to do. They are not supposed to be there to terrify people into so much stress that they end up in an early grave after a life of doing pretty much nothing enjoyable at all.
That’s what Inquisitions and Puritans are for. It’s not what the medical profession is for.
Well, when they’ve scared the weak and feeble to death, let’s see how they cope with those of us who are still here. We’ll still be here because we ignore their scaremongering ‘advice’.
Things could get difficult for them in future.
underdogs bite upwards 
The “no safe level” for alcohol leads right into my piece at the BMJ from ten years ago…
http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/secondary-smoke-alcohol-and-deaths
– MJM
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Of course there’s no massively funded Antialcohol lobby to run huge
epidemiological studies on passive drinking
Ten years ago that was true. Not any more 😉
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Leg, they don’t get 500 to 800 million dollars a year infused into them from a Master Settlement Agreement. People talk about the influence of Big Pharma in our fight, but American smokers and taxpayers dwarf the money BigP puts in.
As far as I know, I am the only real proponent out there who’s steadily pushed on the “second hand alcohol” issue as being roughly equivalent to “second hand smoke” over the years. Also, as far as I know, while there have by this point been somewhere close to 200 studies done on secondary smoke and lung cancer, there HAS NOT BEEN A SINGLE ONE done on alcohol fumes and lung (or any other kind of) cancer.
And yet, if one accepts the “no threshold theory” of carcinogenesis there probably IS a real body count out there… at least as real a one as they argue for smoke. IF you accept the NTT for carcinogenesis that is.
– MJM
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Oh they’ll catch up. The best way to stop people doing something is the ‘think of the cheeeldren’ argument. So the inhalation of no-safe-level alcohol is bound to figure in their prohibitionism sooner or later.
You’re just ahead of the curve 😉
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You may be right. When I wrote Brains I included a text box of Antis complaining about smoke on a restaurant patio. My main pre-pub friend/critic jumped all over me for putting on a crazy tin-foil hat and discrediting my main arguments since *obviously* no one would ever start complaining about people smoking outside.
Yeah, right.
– MJM
P.S. They were also upset that I spent a paragraph talking about “denormalization” — saying that, again, it was just tinfoil hat paranoia with no basis in the real world. Of course by now we’ve seen the word used in all sorts of official and medical sources and no one even questions it.
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Does your critic even remember saying you were wrong?
Selective memory is normal now.
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I’ve found that Google’s Ngram tool is quite helpful for jogging misrememberings.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=smoke+free&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=5&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csmoke%20free%3B%2Cc0
and
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=secondhand+smoke&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=5&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csecondhand%20smoke%3B%2Cc0
and
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=like+licking+an+ashtray&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=5&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Clike%20licking%20an%20ashtray%3B%2Cc0
and
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=passive+smoking&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=5&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cpassive%20smoking%3B%2Cc0
They really have, quite literally, been brainwashed in the truly Orwellian sense. They’re victims just as much as we are.
– MJM
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“ … there HAS NOT BEEN A SINGLE ONE done on alcohol fumes and lung (or any other kind of) cancer.”
My bet, Mike, is that they won’t go down that route. Although in theory the “inhalation of alcohol fumes” is a possibility, my bet is that they’ll go down the route of blaming every social ill in the world (crime, family breakdown, road deaths, violence etc) on alcohol, thus leaving every physical ill in the world to the anti-smokers. Well, they wouldn’t want to tread on the Tobacco Control industry’s toes, would they? After all, they’re essentially both just branches of the same control/puritan tree, formed out of the same vile mould, and the “social ill” side is probably too much of a ready-made gift for them not to take advantage of by exaggerating it out of all proportion. They’ve already made a start by hyped-up, heartstring-tugging anti drink-driving campaigns and (certainly over this side of the pond) pretty much constant drip-feeds of “real-life” police documentaries which always and without fail have the obligatory “drunken louts kicking off” scene shoehorned in there somewhere. The brainwashing has started on that already. Pretty soon, if one’s had a couple of pints down the pub and then you get mugged on the way home by a (sober) crook, it’ll be reported as a “drink-related” crime – although it’ll never be pointed out that it was the victim, rather than the perpetrator, who had been drinking. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that this has already started.
The “passive” angle was such a turning point for Tobacco Control that it would seem sensible for any of these copycat “anti” anything groups to go straight there via the most direct route possible in order to try and emulate anti-smoking’s achievements. The very prospect must make them giddy with excitement.
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Surely the safe level of alcohol is 2cm above the bottom of the bottle.
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Just so you can say you didn’t drink a whole bottle in one night?
An old excuse, that one 😉
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Leg: check your moderation queue: my comment with four links just went there.
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Found it 🙂
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Only safe level of alcohol is enough to do the job.
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NHS to slash safe drinking limits after new evidence reveals how alcohol is linked to certain cancers including breast and bowel
But it’s not new.
2011
Guidelines For Alcohol Consumption Are Inadequate For Cancer Prevention
“Current alcohol consumption guidelines are inadequate for the prevention of cancer and new international guidelines are needed, states an analysis in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).”
“There is increasing evidence that links alcohol consumption to cancer. The WHO International Agency of Research on Cancer has stated, based on evidence, that alcohol is carcinogenic in both animals and humans. Several evaluations of this agency as well the joint 2007 report of the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research warned of the link between alcohol and cancers in the mouth, throat, esophagus, liver, colon-rectum and breast cancers.
Based on the evidence, “there is no level of alcohol consumption for which cancer risk is null.”
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/230871.php
“Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies is to overhaul limit guidelines”
So why has it taken her so long? I thought that in England we were good little sheep.
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Right. Not new at all. IARC listed it as a known human carcinogen years ago, although, very oddly (perhaps uniquely?) they specificed it as “alcoholic beverage consumption,” thus implying either that
A) Carcinogenic substances can become noncarcinogenic simply by changing their physical state (solid,liquid, gas)
or
B) Human muscousal tissues are very smart. When a molecule of although lands on one of them, the tissue cells look at it and say either “OMG! This just came from a shot glass! I’m turning cancerous!” or “Nah, no problem, this molecule was floating in the air. It’s had its carcinogenic badness removed for the rest of eternity.
Oddly enough though, the distillation process seems to fail at curing these molecules of their evil ways. I guess that’s just something we’ll never understand, eh?
– MJM
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Hmm…. since cadmium is a Class 1 carcinogen according to IARC, then that means that sunflower seeds are carcinogenic. In terms of cadmium I believe I once computed that you’d have to live with smokers for something like a hundred years to absorb the same amount that you’d get from one nice big bag of healthful sunflower seeds!
– MJM
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If you want to live like a Seventh Day Adventist, there’s a very simple solution – join their fucking church, but stay the hell away from me!
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If only they would…
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Safe level? Well, I get serious cramp in the legs when swimming these days, therefore about 1 meter 30cm is my safe level, so that when I get cramp I can still stand up and my nose/mouth are above the surface.
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This is why I *never* paid any attention to their stupid ‘units’ and ‘allowances’ in the first place. Have you noticed they’re *never* revised upwards, regardless of new evidence? Clearly all political! Fuck ’em all.
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As I understand it, you have to be on 60 units a week – every week – before you start seriously damaging yourself. The current unit recommendations were plucked out of the air, that’s well documented and openly admitted by those who came up with them.
Until fairly recently, I was exceeding the current weekly limit every day and had been doing so for quite a lot of years. No cancer, no cirrhosis, no nothing. Yes, I even failed at drinking myself to death 😉 Still, it is nice to wake up without a brain full of sand and glue for a change.
It’s all crap. All of it. It’s about control, about seeing you do as you are told. Nothing more than that.
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