Treating symptoms and not the disease
As might be expected, Scottish doctors are on the rampage yet again. First, it was homeopathy, and now it’s alcohol.
In both cases, they fail to recognize the fundamental demands of ethics and humanity.
Regarding their demand that homeopathy be disregarded…no, that it be forcibly trashed by removing homeopathics from the shelves of Boots and other chemists and adding labels saying the medications are useless…please see yesterday’s column.
Regarding their demand that supermarkets not award loyalty points for purchases of alcohol, they are failing to note two significant cultural thrusts, one of which might reduce alcoholism despite loyalty points or any other commercial activity, and the other of which would place the onus for neo-Prohibitionism where it properly lies.
The first cultural factor is this: As of June 30, 2010, the picture of Sir Edward Elgar, foremost British composer of classical and religious music, is being replaced on the 20 pound note with a picture of economist Adam Smith. The government of the United Kingdom has therefore given tacit encouragement to the replacement of cultural heroes by commercial pundits. No one has yet definitively proven whether the theories of Adam Smith or Milton Friedman or Maynard Keynes or Mickey Mouse are the ones most likely to lead to the long-term economic health of nations.
On the other hand, that nations need a vibrant culture, including fine arts, music, dance and even crafts, to thrive cannot be denied. Look, for example, at the state of Afghanistan, where the arts were systematically outlawed by the outlaw Taliban. There is no beauty, no ease, no reason, really, to thrive but only to survive, and that at a basic level. Look at Soviet Russia, in which the only art allowed made giants of puny men, erecting paintings and statues of the unworthy in every public place to indoctrinate the masses. Note: It didn’t work for long.
The Scottish doctors, in their mad rush to blame alcohol itself and the means by which it is purchased for alcohol abuse are mistaking the symptom for the disease. The disease is an impoverished society, in which true cultural heroes are dismissed and mechanics who merely tinker with the conduct of life, rather than investigating the nature of life, are elevated. One cannot hear a passage written by Adam Smith and be transported beyond one’s mundane self; on the other hand, one can hear a composition by Elgar and be transported to a more refined realm, a place where commercial grasping is not seen as the stuff of life.
That is not to say that one must favour classical music to develop as a human, but that classical music is one way. Music, whether Elgar or Elton John, can lift human thoughts beyond that night’s soup, or that day’s corporate takeover. The prescriptions of economists of any age cannot. If a society replaces all cultural heroes such as Elgar with commercial mechanics such as Adam Smith, one can expect a descent into alcoholism and other forms of brutality, as the population will gradually become unfamiliar with the other gifts available to the human psyche to make life a joy and not a drudgery.
The Scottish doctors are missing another extremely cogent point―as cogent in the current climate as the dismissal of culture in favour of economic mechanics: The movement to crack down on drunk driving has been hijacked and turned into neo-Prohibitionism, much to the dismay of the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), Candy Lightner. Briefly, Lightner’s teenage daughter was killed by a drunk driver who got off with an unbearably light sentence. An enraged Lightner vowed to bring drunk driving to national attention in the US, with the goal of toughening sanctions against it and punishment for it.
However, a few years ago, Lightner was quoted regarding the organization she founded and then left this way? “It [MADD] has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I ever wanted or envisioned. I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.” (For more, see an article on the blog Alcohol Problems and Solutions maintained by David J. Hanson, Ph.D., at the State University of New York at Potsdam, here.)
Lightner has reportedly had three drunk driving arrests herself. If one assumes she is merely a social drinker and, like most people, caught in the finely meshed net of already-draconian drunk-driving laws, then one can see how easily she could make that statement, and how apropos it is of the Scottish doctors’ rampage.
Indeed, Scottish doctors seem to have adopted a “demon rum” attitude that goes well beyond anything even the flawed Ms. Lightner envisioned. Possibly, like any population untutored in cause and effect relationships, they have decided that since supermarkets sell a greater percentage of alcohol than do pubs and restaurants, they can make the greatest impact for their rampage by attacking supermarkets. Not, notice, the greatest impact on problems caused by public drunkenness; the greatest impact for the doctors’ reputation among the untutored masses as protectors of the public health.
A spokesman for the Wine and Spirit Trade Association pointed out that no evidence exists to suggest that loyalty points cause problem drinking, nor is there evidence to suggest that removing them would solve the problem. The spokesman was quoted by Gerry Braiden in an article in the Scotland Herald: “Surely it’s time we had a serious debate about the root causes of alcohol misuse.”
Only one doctor in the British Medical Association in Scotland spoke out against the rampage against loyalty points, and she ratified the Wine and Spirit Trade position. Dr. Ellie O’Sullivan sensibly claimed the issue of “excessive drinking in Britain was cultural and that the motion [to disallow loyalty points] would not solve the problem.” To illustrate the ridiculous nature of the doctors’ rampage, she asked, regarding a move to ban drunkenness on public transport, “Are we going to breathalyse everyone getting on a bus?”
Unfortunately, because the doctors have claimed an expertise they lack and a vantage point they do not deserve by virtue of their appalling lack of understanding of cultural values, the answer might be yes. Twelve years ago, it would have been unthinkable to make all air travellers remove their shoes for inspection, empty their pockets, remove their jewellery, buy specially miniaturized bottles of shampoo and subject themselves to apparently random wandings and even pat-downs to go from one country to another.
And yet, it has happened.
It happens when people fail to understand cause and effect relationships and unethically transfer their efforts from finding solutions to the causative events and factors, and apply those efforts instead to altering the effects, regardless of how ineffective such an action might be. One can bring down a high fever by tossing a patient into a bathtubful of cold water, but the patient might die unless the cause of the disease is located and treated. Indeed, the patient might die more quickly because fever is one way the body fights an infection; without the heat, conceivably the disease organisms would be much happier and grow much faster.
Likewise, removing a scintilla of alcohol from shopping carts would seem to be no more than an ice-water bath, and one applied not only to those suffering a disease, but to the disease-free as well. That, alone, makes their “cure” for alcohol abuse unethical. But it is more unethical than that; it simply adds a bit more financial suffering to those who are already suffering alcoholism and does absolutely nothing to address the underlying cause. Nothing at all.
