Tax Alcohol Put The Money Into Prevention Stop The Media From Selling Us To The Alcohol Industry

I am tired.  It's been an exhausting month for my family.  I'm tempted to just say I'll see you in the new year but you know me better than that.  Another thing I got from my family is a big mouth.  

The good news is that my brother didn't die on Christmas day, what we'd all figured he was ornery enough to pull on us. If he had any sense of what's happening around him.  He still hasn't regained consciousness.  I don't know what it is that makes drunks so ornery around Christmas but it seems to go with the territory.  I'll have to go in today or tomorrow and talk to him, try to rouse him.  It's hopeless but it's got to be done.  It's hard, too, to see your younger sibling look like the oldest person you've ever seen and worse because of the jaundice and lesions where his skin is breaking down, I assume due to his dying liver.  We all agreed that we weren't going to sugar coat this, not after seeing it a second time.   I don't know if people saw how horrific end-stage alcoholism is if more of them would stop drinking but it's led most of us to give it up as my mother seeing her uncle die of alcoholism kept her from ever being tempted to take it up.  

I've mentioned before the time during Ken Burn's series on prohibition being on TV I outrage some of the purveyors of the common received wisdom by saying the only thing wrong with prohibition was that it didn't work.   Right thinking people are not supposed to think there was anything to recommend prohibition but, even with all of the problems of smuggling, organized crime, people getting pinched for brewing beer at home, etc. it's not as if having free and easy access to alcohol isn't without its own problems.  But if it had succeeded and no one drank alcohol I don't see that it would be any worse than a world in which no one smoked tobacco or any number of other health ruining habits.  Neither alcohol nor nicotine are things you need to live, you're more likely to die or suffer ill health if you use them.  Both of them are bad for those who are close to those who use them.  Imagine a world in which there were no drunks having accidents on the roads, no drunks getting violent with other people, no one getting drunk and raped, etc.  

I'd like to see a stiff national tax put on liquor with the proceeds used for grass roots alcohol prevention programs and a ban on movies and TV shows presenting drinking as glamorous and sophisticated. Product placement in those are the diseducation that has sold us out to some of the more destructive industries allowed to operate openly around us.  The schools don't have a chance of changing that, as I mentioned last week, they are swamped by the competition for the time and minds of students, they should not be required to try things like that when they are already at a disadvantage in doing what they are supposed to be doing now.