This is really happening

Quote of the week comes from Dick Puddlecote, writing about the World Health Organisation's plans to copy the anti-smoking blueprint to the letter when they launch the war on alcohol in January:

I once suggested to some beardy tossbag from CAMRA that he should throw his weight behind objecting to tobacco prohibition because his vice was next. He piffled that drinkers were too numerous to be subject to the same denormalisation.

May God rot his middle class pompous paunch if he doesn't now realise that he was disastrously wrong.

Please read Dick's whole piece, as well as both New Scientist articles, because I find the whole thing too wearying, depressing and predictable to write about right now. Suffice to say, the phrase "passive drinking" is going to enter common parlance over the next few months and years. The WHO intends to challenge the "neoliberal ideology which promotes the drinker's freedom to choose his or her own behaviour" (since when was the freedom to choose one's own behaviour a "neoliberal ideology"?)

And, this being the World Health Organisation, the policies they come up with will apply not just to individuals, nor even to individual countries, but to the whole of the human race. There is no escape.

Those of us who have been warning against this for the last few years get no pleasure from being proven right. And yet still there will be those who say it won't really happen. That they'll be happy with a little extra tax on alcohol. That they'll stop once they've banned drinks advertising. Meanwhile, the tee-totallers will assure themselves that food isn't the next thing on the list.

Why am I reminded of Charlie Brown running up to kick that football again and again and again?

And all they wanted was non-smoking sections on aeroplanes...