Restoring wisdom
In an unexpected shift of emphasis, Official Medical Experts are finally recognizing (again!) that alcohol is bad.

The study of 600,000 drinkers estimated that having 10 to 15 alcoholic drinks every week could shorten a person's life by between one and two years. And they warned that people who drink more than 18 drinks a week could lose four to five years of their lives.

For several decades the Official Experts have been focusing EXCLUSIVELY on the sins of tobacco, while telling us of the supposed benefits of wine.

The statistical mean, as always, blurs the important difference between heavy users.

When you use tobacco steadily and heavily, you'll lose about 5 years but you'll keep your intelligence and gain mental stability. You may avoid suicide.

When you use alcohol steadily and heavily, you'll lose about 20 years, and your brain will lose its judgment and intelligence long before you die. You're more likely to commit suicide, and you're VASTLY more likely to kill other people by violence or accident.

The important distinction is what happens BEFORE you die.

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From a Natural Law viewpoint the same distinction shows up.

There are about a dozen 'traditional' drugs that have been used for thousands of years by large numbers of people. Coffee, alcohol, tea, tobacco, qat, marijuana, betel nuts.

These drugs are 'traditional' because the people that use them survive. Perhaps they survive better than drug-free people, or perhaps worse, but in either case they don't die FAST. Otherwise the tradition would have died with the users.

Newer drugs like meth are not 'traditional' because they kill fast. If any group in the past had been addicted to concentrated uppers, we wouldn't know about it because they wouldn't have left any sort of record.

Among the traditionals, alcohol is singled out for disapproval. The writers of the Old Testament were familiar with alcohol and various forms of tea, and probably qat. They warned against alcohol. Islam sacralized coffee and prohibited alcohol. The old American tribes sacralized tobacco and restricted alcohol to extremely narrow sacred uses.

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Sidenote on Injuns: Modern archeologists agree that Injuns knew about alcohol before Euro tribes invaded, and that Injuns were smart enough and civilized enough to avoid it. When your agriculture and trade are based on corn, you're going to have lots of corn likker around whether you want it or not. Corn ferments enthusiastically. Injuns figured out that corn likker was bad and decided to avoid it.

When the Euros picked up corn as a crop, we also had lots of corn likker around, but we were too dumb and shallow and uncultured to avoid it. We based our agriculture and trade on the likker instead of the corn, and we're STILL DOING IT. See ethanol.

If you're going to talk about one race "giving alcohol" to the other, it would make more sense to treat corn likker as the well-deserved Injun revenge on the Euros.

Later on, some tribes succumbed to alcohol, but NOT because they suddenly encountered alcohol for the first time. The relevant variable here is culture, not whiskey. We didn't give them alcohol, we stole their culture.

Labels: Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 9:28 AM