WHO calls for cigarette-style cancer warnings on alcohol packaging
Cancer charities back call for ‘prominent’ warning labels while industry body says move ‘not proportionate’
I give up. Who?
World health organisation
RIP bashorg.
the doctor.
Maybe work on making life less shitty so people don't drink more?
Pretty sure the WHO is working on that.
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
So we should be researching safer psychoactive drugs that don't affect the body as much /s
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Ban all advertising for alcohol, too, please
You can't advertise alcohol on the TV in my country. Only exception is beer.
You! This woman! Sex! You in a tuxedo fucking this woman!
Drunk as fuck!
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.
"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.
I can never tell anymore if people actually believe it or just post it.
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.
Yes please. Sick of the double standard. Can't buy flavoured nicotine anymore but can still buy sickeningly flavoured liquor.
The alcohol lobby is pretty strong in the US. Good thing we dropped out of WHO. Now we can poison ourselves in peace.
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.
Can we do all petroleum products too?
this product is causing mass extinction of an estimated X thousand species
Yes please. It will kill a lot more people than cigarettes or alcohol.
You don't have a choice on the matter, so why waste bandwidth with empty proposals? Consumer tendencies and ideology is an illusion to keep movements away from threatening economic interests of the industrial/banking world. Change can never come from consumer modification.
I have no problem with that. We should be aware of the risks involved with our vices.
Ehhhhhh alcohol is nowhere near as dangerous as cigarettes. The point of labelling cigarettes is that they're so exceptional dangerous.
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.
Labels need to be on all food, too, in the US of A. All of our food is cancerous.
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.
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.
Like cigarettes. Targeting alcohol too is an example of making the labels useless.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
The thing is. Alcohol can be used in for example cooking. Cigarettes have no good purpose, nothing you can really do with them that has utility outside of direct consumption that exposes you to the full health risks.
And at that point I fear you're also diminishing the unique harm and danger of cigarettes which produce second hand smoke which exposes others, including kids to health dangers without their consent.
How about we slay the first demon here before starting to equate another lesser one with it? Most people do not have a risk of getting addicted to alcohol, nearly everyone has a risk with a few tries of getting addicted to nicotine and it's spreading like a plague among children with candy and sweets flavored cartridges for the poison that is e-cigs. This undoing a generation of progress.
It really does risk making more people dismissing the unique dangers and threat of nicotine and smoke products by equating the two and risks creating a DARE moment where the whole thing is just mocked by rising anti-science, anti-expert sentiment spurred on by capitalists eager to undo regulations. I mean things like this are catnip to people like RFK who want to torpedo evidence based science in favor of vibes and snake oil because it presents an in with your average person to criticize the health establishment over at least misplaced priorities.
Drinking on its own is a danger to the drinker. Only when done to excess does it endanger others. Smoking at all produces second-hand smoke and can encourage others to join an addictive behavior that is very, very hard to quit and will be a monkey on their back for years, decades after they stop whereas MOST humans can stop drinking alcohol with less ill effects than stopping daily consumption of caffeine.
Any amount of alcohol is a carcinogen and unhealthy, but at the same time we have to ask what level of risk is okay. Any amount of charred food cooked on charcoal is also a health risk for instance and can lead to exposure to carcinogens. The unique problems of cigarettes and nicotine were always impacts to others who didn't make that choice including children trapped with smoker parents as well as the addictive properties which left most users trapped or facing a hard fight to stop as well as bad behaviors by industry to hook people while they were young and down. Yes the alcohol industry also tries to get teens and young people to drink but nearly all of them can just stop after they leave college and go on to have a healthy life with zero or limited interactions with alcohol, you cannot say the same for someone who starts using nicotine and uses it heavily for even 6 months.
It's a label change... you can still use it in your cooking.
This ignores the other issues of alcohol. Cigarettes may be worse for the one consuming them but alcohol kills many, many people in car crashes that would have been preventable without alcohol. Stopping the consumption of alcohol needs to be a goal as far as possible. Your point about cooking, I don’t really see as too important. Sure, alcohol has uses like cleaning or cooking, this doesn’t change the danger present from it.
If you mean more traumatic images in people's faces, fuck off.
Do people want me to post 4chan gore here? Maybe some goatse and blue waffle and tubgirl? No? Then maybe you understand.
Forcing people to see that shit if they even stand near a legal-but-icky product is not worth these excuses. Tax it more to reduce consumption. Don't deliberately traumatize people, for any reason.
Why are you against this? I thought it was shown the advertising is reasonably affective?
If tobacco and alcohol are so toxic and dangerous why are they legal? If banning and restricting substances was so effective why is there such a large percentage of youth hooked and nearly incapable of anything than petty crimes?
I'll tell you why, because the system to balance itself and justify all the fascism and violence it holds a monopoly on it needs to criminalize a portion of the population to justify general repression. This is how you can maintain the absolute extreme in inequality, violence and legitimizing violence for the benefit of the majority.
I grew up in a society nobody tried to prevent kids from drinking, and I had not seen a kid drunk. Then in the US I was shocked that the first party I attended half the people were tripping falling down and passing out, and that was called fun!
There is a deeper reason of repression, and it is not to protect the public's health. If they gave a shit about health they would have made health care free and accessible to all as a public service it should have been, together with education, shelter, and nutrition.
Because it's traumatic imagery being shoved in people's faces. I don't give a shit whether it works.
I already don't smoke and never will - but I have to be exposed to that shit, just looking at the wrong part of a shelf. You could probably put pictures of exploded rat carcasses and starving children on there, apropos of nothing, and yeah no kidding it'll impact sales!
No practical goal justifies putting this Rottencom gore and shock content on commodity consumer goods. You wanna reduce sales? Tax it more. Don't commit psychological warfare against anyone who glances upward at a gas station.
Please no. Some of the bottles are so good looking. The cigarette warning are disgusting.
you want to see disgusting, go see babies being born crack addicted and if they survive day two moms fight doctors to take them out because they need their fix, and the baby is going through withdrawal ... it is like watching the scariest movie.
Not the same.
I think a good compromise would be a simple overwrap or removable label that can be removed after purchase.
You mean buy black label but you will not know the color till you unwrap the bottle
Jack daniels in a white with black print milk container
That’s a great idea. Give me a nasty label I can remove. Makes its point but I can still have my pretty bar. I agree it should be made clear but those who can luckily control themselves don’t deserve to be punished.
Oof that's a terrible idea
I agree that those are way over the top but attractive packaging for selling drugs is just not ok. And i say this as an enjoyer. Responsible use is common and normal human behavior.
Completely neutral package with a clear label of for informed, responsible, adult use is just sensible.
But i want to stretch that the image it is sold as does not mean that should be the final look. There is a lot of potential creativity left to make something safe to put on a shelf or site but is in hand still classy for the user to enjoy. After all, the good vibes of aesthetics on the table are not nearly as bad as those from the drug itself, while taking that away actually puts more emphasis in that purely chemical high.
If we go to far we with with neutralizing we could end deciding that flavors make drugs appealing (flavored cigarettes are actually band in places) but for liquor that can backfire to reducing everything to wodka.
That's the whole point.
It won't help beers but I wouldn't mind the wide scale reintroduction of decanters to the modern age. I have accumulated a few since I've been of drinking age and they all feel fancier than pouring from the bottle.
I think it depends. At least in my area decanters went from classy to tacky for some reason in popular culture. Can you share photos of yours? I've never used them. I think it might make sense to use them if you keep one good bourbon, gin, vodka, etc. But if you're like me and mostly drink bourbon/whisk(ey) then that would just be difficult.
