It took decades of fighting to get smoking banned, and if everyone and their uncle didn't have a parent dying of lung cancer, it probably wouldn't have happened.
No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
bribes
/thread
basically alcohol gets a pass because its a drug that has been in use since the stone age. Im a big "victimless" crimes person and I would like to see much legalized but I would like them all put into a category where its allowed at home or at licensed establishments and advertising is limited to private residences or at businesses that are in the category. I would restrict the signage for the businesses to. So the brothel, race track, casino, dispensiary, liquor store would look rather non descript from the outside but all would have controlled entry to only allow adults and inside it would likely be filled with ads for other establishments.
I agree with everything. I want to add, a lot of drugs have been used since the stone ages. Animals, not just humans, tend to use drugs fairly commonly. It's only a modern thing to think they're purely bad.
With that said, modern drugs often remove them from their cultural context, and are in higher purities and larger quantities than are naturally available. Chewing on a coca leaf is a lot different than doing cocaine, even though they're largely the same thing (though the coca leaf has a lot of stuff that's removed in processing to make cocaine). Cultures where it's common, it doesn't cause nearly the same issues as cocaine does in other places, because they don't have the same culture around it and are sometimes getting a lot more.
I agree though; people should be allowed to do what they want. The government shouldn't be deciding it for them, and neither should advertising. They should be free from pressure either way to decide what they want to put into their body.
I agree with all that but is lime to see a tax on it to fund treatment centers.
Not sure where you live, but I think basically every state in the USA has an extra tax on alcohol.
Look up "sin tax"
I don't think much, or any, of that is going to recovery programs though.
We don't, alcohol adverts are just as illegal as tobacco. Of course; that might not be the case everywhere on the planet :P
Bit of a shot in the dark, but seems like cigarette companies have lied in front of congress / courts saying cigarettes are healthy / not bad for you and have been caught red handed in their lies.
Big alcohol hasn't ever done anything that egregious. Everyone knows its not exactly healthy to drink, and Big Alcohol doesn't seem to have ever argued that. I know there's the occasional "a glass of red wine is good for your heart" stuff, but they're also not making any attempt to deny a gallon of wine per day will probably cause cirrhosis, ya know?
Just adding. The liquor industry has been pushing the 'drink responsibly' line for decades. Back in the day they tried to get an AA member to sign on as a spokesperson but AA asked the member not to do it and they agreed.
Just FYI, the 1 glass a day study didn't exclude ex alcoholics, so they polluted the zero-glass-a-day group with bad health making the 1-glass-a-day look healthier in comparison.
The study has been redone and it shows that the less alcohol you consume the better it is, no exceptions.
Alcohol has also just been more prevalent in human cultures dating back to prehistory. Some of the earliest evidence we have of permanent human settlements were breweries, theorized to have been built by people who still lived semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles. That would mean that humans first started making permanent settlements and doing large-scale agriculture only to produce alcohol, and still mainly relied on hunting and gathering for their caloric needs. Other drugs / intoxicants have been used by humans for at least as long, but none have been so central to the development of civilization and culture than alcohol.
Well, there are places where it is illegal. EU for example.
But of course they get around that by advertising their "0.0%" beers etc.
That loophole is closed in Norway at least.
Can’t even advertise for a Heineken T-shirt if you wanted to
They have better ~~bribers~~ lobbyists
You know when you see an advertisement for a casino, and they have a picture of a guy winning money? That's false advertising, because that happens the least. That's like if you're advertising a hamburger, they could show a guy choking. "This is what happened once."
Mitch Hedberg
One thing you see in the alcohol adds, no one ever actually drinks on screen.
I am aware of that. I just don’t see that as “problem solved” when they show a nice bourbon being poured onto clear ice.
Similarly, why are they allowed to advertise every fancy new and half untested medicine out there?
Like, take such and such drug to eliminate pimples, but possible side effects are hair loss, heart attack, brain bleeding, rectal leakage, miscarriage, loss of fingernails and toenails, blah blah...
Ask your doctor if Nwxalviva is right for you
"Yeah, I know you went through 8 years of med school and internships and have years and years of experience and ongoing education, but I heard part of a 30 second commercial playing in the background so I think I'm pretty well qualified to make this suggestion to you..."
I spend a lot of time in Ireland and tbh I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for regular alcoholic drinks like beers and whiskeys.. However a lot of these companies skirt around rules, at least here at the moment, by making ads about non alcoholic versions instead. So you see a lot of Guinness 0.0 and Heineken 0.0 etc.
Tbh even that should banned at this stage too.
What's worse though is gambling advertising. I fucking hate that shit so much. Its popularity preys on desperate people and further drives the K shaped economy we are seeing nowadays. Its so fucked up.
Gambling ads and sponsorships are crippling the youth. I know lads coming out of school in debt to loads of people to be down the bookies.
The zero ads are a workaround but I wouldnt be so annoyed if they were a different price at the tap!
I would miss the guiness ads but they aren't even Irish anymore so fuck em.
Advertising is weaponized pollution. All of it. In any shape or form. It is littering and spreading garbage for profit.
Bill Hicks had an excellent suggestion for those in that industry.
A few reasons.
First, the alcohol industry has been a lot more sensitive to being perceived as selling to kids than the tobacco industry was. Because of it, there was never the push to ban advertising and conduct a mass media effort to control teen drinking as there was teen smoking.
Second, people still remember prohibition in the USA and how it was a failure. So, you've got a lot of people worried about a slippery slope in comparison to tobacco.
Third, the alcohol industry is far better at lobbying around specific items that would actually prevent consumption. For instance, alcoholic beverages don't need to show nutritional information. It will bend in a way that keeps access open.
all advertisement is bad. best to avoid all of it. use the fediverse, don't use commercial internet platforms.
r/USdefaultism
is what I'd say if this were reddit lol
Canada has aboot 40 million people, the UK has about 70 million, Australia has 30 million, and New Zealand (5 million) is basically a rounding error. Since the US has over 300 million people, other English speakers tend to migrate to primarily US platforms.
What I find most interesting about these statistics is the difference in population density between the UK and the USA. Although the US is ~40 times larger, it only contains 7x more people.

The proof that there is only Texas as promised.
(For those that didn’t see the comments about assuming everyone is American. This explains the Texas education system.
Btw no one in Texas calls it “the gulf of America “ we thinks that’s stupid to.
In Russia, alcohol ads are banned. So, beer ads take all the air, rolling their usual, and adding a small fast "nonalcoholic" at the end for their obscure nonalcolohic version no one cares about.
So, effectively, advertising your beer is legal as long as you have a nonalcoholic version.
I think about this with grocery stores. All you want is some cereal and there's a giant aisle of temptation people have to walk through
It is always so weird traveling outside of Norway and see commercials for alcohol.
Money. Cigarette ads were justly banned. The Marlboro Man and Joe Camel were iconic brands. The latter was designed specifically to encourage kids to smoke. As a kid, I thought Joe Camel was cool as shit. I didn't want to smoke because of him, but I liked his vibe. (It wasn't lost on me that his head was shaped like a penis; that was an intentional design choice, but he was still a cool dude.) That said, when I turned 18 and I tried smoking, I bought a pack of Camel filters, but that was because it was my mom's brand. I tried like two. Decided it wasn't for me. My mom's only beef was that I bought a hard pack — she always bought soft packs. I never got that. Anyway, she got 18 smokes for free, and even back when they were $1.50 a pack, that was a heck of a deal. (Fortunately she did not make me chain smoke the rest of them. I learned my lesson. Plus, I was 18.)
But we still sell cigarettes and we could still sell alcohol. Just don’t advertise it on tv and such.
As for addiction I disagree (I smoke) I stoped smoking for 2 years before my divorce. I never could stop drinking.
On top of that you (though it’s very difficult mentally” you could go from a pack a day to zero in one day without negative effects. I’ve done it once before.
Alcohol… I decided I needed to quit drinking a well ago, but I have to wait for a bed at a treatment center before I can quite. Otherwise I’ll die…
I think drinking is pretty dangerous.
“No body smoke occasionally “ paraphrasing of course.
Yes they absolutely do. “I only smoke when I drink “ is a very common thing. Lots of people only smoke when they get stressed.