HYPOCRITICAL GOVERNMENTS IGNORE ALCOHOL'S DANGERS

A glossy brochure recently dropped out of my newspaper: "Discover your
taste for whisky," it advised. As it happens, I discovered my taste
for whisky long ago and so was not in need of this advice. But it
struck me as surpassingly odd that the Ontario liquor board is
spending a considerable amount of money to convince the uninitiated to
try potent forms of a psychoactive drug whose known risks include
addiction, cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal disorders, liver
cirrhosis, several types of cancer, fetal alcohol syndrome and fatal
overdose.

According to a 2006 study prepared by the Centre for Addiction and
Mental Health, alcohol consumption was responsible for 8,103 deaths in
2002. Of all deaths among those under age 70, alcohol was the cause of
one in 16.

Western cultures have a bizarre relationship with psychoactive drugs.
Some are believed to be so dangerous they are banned and those who
make, sell or use them are deemed criminals and outcasts. But when a
government-owned corporation seeks to boost alcohol consumption by
marketing the drug as a sociable and sophisticated indulgence, no one
sees anything amiss.

Why would we? Alcohol isn't dangerous and destructive, we assume. And
that assumption lies at the heart of the contradiction.

"Canadians have an exaggerated view of the harms associated with
illegal drug use but consistently underestimate the serious negative
impact of alcohol on society," concluded a report released earlier
this year by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. We overestimate
the risks of consuming illicit drugs while greatly underestimating the
risks of the legal variety. For psychologists who study the perception
of risk, this is predictable.

One of the mechanisms the unconscious mind uses to make intuitive
judgments about risk is the "availability heuristic:" The easier it is
to think of an example of something happening, the greater the
probability of that thing happening will seem.

News and entertainment media are filled with stories about people who
suffer as a result of taking an illicit drug, but they almost never
have stories of people who take an illicit drug without bad
consequences following -- even though the latter event is vastly more
common than the former. The opposite is true of alcohol: As a 2003
study of British television found, stories of people suffering as a
result of drinking do appear occasionally -- almost always in the news
- -- but those stories are "infrequent" compared to "positive,
convivial, funny images" of drinking.

Personal experience multiplies this effect. Alcohol use is so common
and open we all know lots of people who drink without coming to grief.
But illicit drug use -- marijuana excepted -- is relatively rare. When
this biased information is run through the availability heuristic, we
form the intuitive conclusion that harm is very likely to come from
taking an illicit drug but very unlikely to result from drinking alcohol.

The "affect heuristic" is another mechanism of the unconscious mind.
"Affect" simply means emotion and this heuristic uses emotions as a
measure of risk: Positive feelings drive the perception of risk down,
while negative feelings push it up. Someone who grew up with a beloved
dog will have a much lower intuitive sense of the risk of dog attack
than someone whose only contact with dogs was being chased by one on
the way home from school.

In our culture, alcohol is not only accepted, it is embraced and
celebrated. Drugs like heroin, cocaine and -- to a lesser extent --
marijuana are reviled. Those dramatically different cultural positions
produce dramatically different feelings which, once again, drive
perceived risks in opposite directions.

The cumulative effect of these influences is to produce radically
different perceptions about the risks posed by alcohol and other
drugs. They are so different, in fact, that we often don't even
consider alcohol to be a drug -- which is why we often hear the
nonsensical phrase "alcohol and drugs."

This is wholly irrational. And most of us are blind to
it.

I once attended a dinner in Ottawa that brought together RCMP
officers, DEA agents, politicians and civil servants in honour of a
visit by the United Nations' top anti-drug official. There was an open
bar. And so, as speakers denounced the evils of drugs and vowed to
continue the fight for "a drug-free world" -- an official goal of the
UN -- most of the people nodding their heads and applauding vigorously
were buzzed on a drug that has killed far more people than all the
illicit drugs combined.

Bizarre juxtapositions like this abound, but they don't come any
stranger than a government spending large sums of money suppressing
drug use while a corporation owned by that same government spends
large sums of money encouraging drug use.

That happens every day in Canada. And no one sees anything amiss.