The nanny state fucking drives me to drink

Millions are risking their health by having a glass or two of wine according to the Nanny State.

A comprehensive survey claims that middle aged, professional Britons are more likely to exceed recommended daily levels of alcohol consumption than the working-classes, with twice as many drinking every night of the week.
The Government-dictated safe limit is three to four units a day for men, or two to three for women.

The fucking what? The Government-dictated limit? So they've sent doctors and scientists around to everybody to work out exactly how much they can safely drink, and by the most monumental fucking coincidence it turns out that it's almost the same for everyone depending only on gender. Of course they fucking haven't. They just got a board of big nosed cunts with medical degrees to pull a number out of their collective arsehole* and present it to the government of the day, and which has been used as a tool to lecture people by every fucking government since. And now it's a fucking diktat? Fuck off.

By the sounds of it this latest study has got square root of fuck all medical content as it was actually carried out by the Office of national Statistics. It's a fairly safe bet that the statisticians involved are experts on numbers and statistics but pretty weak on medicine and the long term effects of alcohol on the human body, so it's probably also a safe bet that they simply took the "safe limits" as a given and went from there. Now if that's right then fair enough. But if it's wrong, if the limits are far wider than between 3 and 4 units a day for men and 2-3 for women, then the foundation on which the study is based is about as strong as the head on a pint of Guinness.

But really that's not the point of the exercise is it? Like cigarettes if the government really gave a shit about the health issues they'd just classify it alongside pot or another illegal drug, but whether left or right, Tory or Labour, they're always far more addicted to the revenue than the most irredeemable alcoholic is to grog (or any smoker to nicotine for that matter). It's just a fucking pretence of caring thinly covering up a desire to poke and pry into people's lives, and regulate and tax and regulate and tax and regulate and tax and.....

I don't want to understate the effects of long term alcohol abuse, and I've had a couple of family members drink themselves into early graves so I don't want to understate the effects it can have on other people either. It ain't nice and it's bloody upsetting to lose someone you care about deeply because they couldn't leave the bloody bottle alone. But you just can't tell people how to live their lives whether you're their family or a government mouthpiece. That particular cure is worse than the disease.



* I couldn't remember where I'd seen it before, but fortunately Devil's Kitchen rants on the same topic and had a link.