I'm going to fucking bottle you, you fucks!

Via Mr Eugenides (whose entire piece is well worth reading), this latest piece of "policy" is really going to piss me right off.

The campaigns to combat the effects of ‘passive smoking’ are widely credited for Europe’s growing number of smoking bans. Now alcohol is in the sights of the public health lobbyists, and they have invented the concept of ‘passive drinking’ as their killer argument.

The public health lobbyists are all, to a sanctimonious man and interfering woman, a bunch of fuck-witted, facist cunt. Actually, I'm not sure that fascist is the right word: what to use instead? Authoritiarian? Dictatorial? Piece of shit nosy cunts with too much fucking time on their hands? Why don't they go and drink themselves to death and do us all a favour, eh?

I have seen a leaked draft report for the European Commission, which is due to be published some time in June. It makes claims about the high environmental or social toll of alcohol, the ‘harm done by someone else’s drinking’. The report is likely to inform proposals for a European Union alcohol strategy later this year.

Ah, and how soon before we have the report into "the harm done by someone else's driving", "the ahrm done by someone eslse's technological advances" and "the harm done to my blood pressure by these pissy, tree-hugging cunts"? Dear god, what the fuck is happening to our society. And why the fuck haven't we left the fucking stupid, murderous, isolationist conglomeration of national failures that comprises the EU?

Dr Peter Anderson, the report’s lead author, who has a background in the World Health Organisation (WHO) and plays a leading role in Tobacco Free Initiative Europe...

Oh, great; the man is a practised health fascist. That's fan-fucking-tastic. My contempt for this turd knows no bounds.

... tells me that the concept of social harm takes the alcohol debate beyond the traditional limits of individual choice and addiction. ‘You can make the argument that what an individual drinks is up to them, provided they understand what they are doing and bearing in mind that alcohol is a dependency-producing drug…

So, apparently, is having the power to interfere in other people's lives and getting paid for it. You hideous, piss-stained fuck.

But when you talk about harm to others then that is a societal concern and justification for doing something about it. I think that is an important argument. If there was not harm to others then the argument gets a little less powerful’

Oh, piss off, Peter Andreson. Go and heal your patients and stop being such a authoritarian cunt.

The draft report doesn’t mince its words when it comes to estimating the social harms of alcohol. ‘The total tangible cost of alcohol to EU society in 2003 was estimated to be €125bn (€79bn-€220bn), equivalent to 1.3 per cent GDP, and which is roughly the same value as that found recently for tobacco.’ (2) The report further highlights the broader social cost of drinking, with the proviso that ‘these estimates are subject to a wide margin of error, [and] they are likely to be an underestimate of the true gross social cost of alcohol’.

Yeah. And. So. What?

‘The intangible costs show the value people place on pain, suffering and lost life that occurs due to the criminal, social and health harms caused by alcohol’, says the report. ‘In 2003 these were estimated to be €270bn, with other ways of valuing the same harms producing estimates between €150bn and €760bn.’

Right, so essentially you are just plucking figures out of the air inorder to support your horrible, fucking fascism. And what are the "intangible" benefits of the pleasure brought by alcohol? Did you measure them, you tedious little fucker?

As Anderson indicates, emphasising the alleged social rather than individual consequences of alcohol will be key to the new campaign. The theme of ‘passive drinking’ was flagged up early on. A Commission working group on alcohol health met in Luxembourg on 9 June 2004 to discuss, among other things, early progress on Anderson’s report. Draft minutes note that the participants, EU and national officials and various experts, were on the hunt for ‘main reasons why there is a need to reduce alcohol-related harm’.

Oh, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!

The report claims that as alcohol consumption, or ‘other people’s’ drinking, increases, so too does social harm. ‘Harms done by someone else’s drinking range from social nuisances such as being kept awake at night through more serious consequences such as marital harm, child abuse, crime, violence and homicide. Generally the higher the level of alcohol consumption, the more serious is the crime or injury.’

Really? I might quote Mr E here:

I have never beaten my girlfriend whilst drunk (nor, for the avoidance of doubt, whilst sober). I do not have any children and do not abuse any. I have never got into a fight in a pub. I have never committed a crime drunk. I have never, at the time of writing, killed anyone, drunk, sober, or stoned. Kept neighbours awake? Well, maybe once or twice in my salad days. Fuck them, they were disagreeable old bats.

The idea that this behaviour of mine needs to be regulated for my own sake and the sake of society is absolutely wrong.

Quite.

This insanity is being driven by the European Commission's chosen author for this report, the Institute of Alcohol Studies, which belies its splendid name, as it is closely associated with Alliance House, a temperance organisation of long standing.

What is it about doctors, eh? Why can't they just stick to doing their fucking jobs? Only last year we were being bothered by a head-up-his-arse-which-he-needed-a-map-to-find, sanctimonious fuckwit surgeon who proposed that everyone should be limited to three pints a day. My response to Dr Anderson is much the same as it was to Mr John Smith:

Surgeons are here to patch people up, OK? They are not here to make politics, so why don't you take your drinking limit and shove it up your arse? And then you can FUCK OFF! The last thing that we need is interfering busybodies like you giving this bunch of fascist wankscum ideas. I bet some fucking lightbulbs went off in the Labour policy unit when you came up with that idea, John.

Except that, apparently, it wasn't in Labour Party HQ that the lightbulbs went off, but in that bastion of democracy and accountability known as the European Union.

Fuck you, Smith, and the fucking horse that you rode in on. Fuck off and heal the sick, and leave the rest of us alone you shit-for-brains monkey-masturbator.

And, no: that's not the alcohol talking, it's just me.

Dr Peter Anderson and Mr John Smith: two gentlemen who prove that, not only does having qualifications mean that you aren't as thick as fucking shit, but who also both illustrate the one of the clearest arguments possible for allowing me to condemn certain arseholes to death. What a couple of cunts.

UPDATE: As Anon points out in the comments, there is, of course, a

nugget of truth in the argument is that alcohol consumption does have external costs - the disturbance that others experience when a bunch of pissed-up Glaswegians reel down the road singing, the low-level vandalism caused by drunk people, "pavement pizzas" and so on.

Most of these costs are relatively small, though, and one should note that alcohol is already highly taxed. It seems rather likely that the tax on alcohol already exceeds those costs."

Yup, and if you are worried about the costs of this violence, then you increase the penalties for those who indulge in it, not restrict the freedoms of those who don't. We dole out extra penalties for those who have accidents whilst drink-driving; why not double the fines or sentences of those who are convicted of drunken assaults, for instance?

That way, you see, you punish the guilty without impingeing on the freedoms of the innocent.