UK plans to pass law banning anyone born after 2008 to buy cigarettes

PurpleDime:

Any doctor who tells you that moderate alcohol consumption has no negative consequences is either misinformed, or lying. People have a hard time accepting new scientific evidence that shifts a commonly accepted paradigm. That includes doctors. I think informed doctors would tell their patients otherwise.

Poor wording on my part perhaps. I wasn’t saying a doctor wouldn’t tell you there are risks. But a doctor will also tell you about the risks of eating red meat. This doesn’t mean you can’t do it in moderation, or that it’s comparable to smoking.

What I’m getting at with the comparison to alcohol is, if you tell your doctor you drink 1 beer or glass of wine a week, your doctor probably isn’t going to tell you to stop. They would likely warn you against starting to drink any amount of alcohol if you weren’t already and said you were planning to start, however. On the other hand, if you told your doctor you were smoking a pack of cigarettes a week, they would almost certainly talk to you about the importance of quitting.

The point isn’t that alcohol is healthy. The point isn’t even about what doctors recommend. It’s that light drinking isn’t going to harm you anywhere near the extent that even light smoking would.

Also, part of the problem is, it is at least possible to drink in moderation, I would challenge anyone to smoke in moderation. Nicotine is far more addictive than alcohol. Maybe that’s the only reason smokers have more negative health outcomes? Because there’s not as many people who can manage to remain merely light smokers? But regardless it’s still a factor.

I’ll reiterate. Every cigarette reduces your lifespan, on average, by 10-20 minutes. Drinking one beer or glass of wine has not been demonstrated to have this kind of direct measurable effect on your lifespan like cigarettes have.

And again, I am not an advocate of drinking, I am arguing this because it’s important to remember just how dangerous cigarettes are, even compared to another dangerous drug like alcohol.