But Is It Safe To Drink?

Times are getting tough when a a national medical association starts campaigning to increase taxes on wine. I find it difficult to believe that the AMA is truly representing its membership, which contributes like few other industries or professions to the growing, making and consumption of wine, when it demands an increase of 40 in the price of alcohol.

To increase the price of wine would have no impact on the problem of alcohol abuse, which the Federation of Australian Winemaker Associations FAWA have begun to address with the launch of a National Alcohol Education Programme.

Such an impost in price would only act to the detriment of the ninety-eight percent of people who enjoy wine in moderation, a figure supplied recently by AGB Research, owners of McNair Anderson.

Those few individuals who choose wine as the alcoholic medium they elect to abuse are hardly likely to be deterred by the price increase proposed, which would surely be met by shifting funds from other areas of domestic expenditure. In fact, such a result would only exacerbate an already undesirable situation. Perhaps the AMA should be selective in which alcoholic beverages they target, rather than to suggest blanket solutions which clearly ignore basic realities.

It is the general consumer, winemaker and grower, into one of which categories fall the vast majority of the medical practitioners I know and drink regularly with, that will bear the brunt of such tactics. For one reason or other the Australian wine industry is on its knees. A blow of this nature would be final for many within.

Health promotion and advice has become a global industry of mammoth proportions that plays upon our worries and insecurities, then finally corners us into submission; into lives without pleasure, enjoyment and fun. Like the fate it promises to everyone who dares to risk that extra indulgence, it takes itself very seriously indeed. Nowhere more than in California, and today on no topic more vehemently than with alcohol.

Professor David Whitten, Assistant Professor of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, believes many people have fallen prey to the exaggerated health consciousness of our time, believing the distorted and oft-trumpeted warnings by the neo prohibitionists of the numerous hazards of consuming any alcohol whatever – evidence he strongly rejects.

“They seek to brand all alcohol consumption as harmful and to eliminate the distinction between use and abuse of alcoholic beverages”, says Professor Whitten. “Furthermore, since it is true that alcohol has actions that are manifestly pharmaceutical in nature, they have sought to eliminate the distinction between alcohol and drugs. For the overwhelming majority who are moderate drinkers, there is no reason to change a lifestyle that includes a pleasurable and distinctly beneficial habit.”

What’s more, this new ‘health consciousness’ is contagious, and doesn’t recognise continental borders. Symptoms of the same attitudes are here in Australia, either represented by people who believe that by protecting us from ourselves they are achieving good in this world, or else, like the faceless individuals with empires to protect in Government departments, they will keep altering the story and making it worse, to protect their power and research grants.

“Warning! Drinking distilled spirits, beer, wine coolers and other alcoholic beverages may increase cancer risk in pregnant women and can cause birth defects”!! Hardly the sort of message you would expect emblazoned on a ten-inch square sign as you walk into a restaurant, but that’s the sort of thing Californians are getting used to.

Other signs five inches square preach the same cheerful message on every Californian table, menu and wine-list and at every cash register or point of sale. The signs must also be displayed at every commercial wine-tasting or gathering. However, the signs do not distinguish between moderate and immoderate use of alcohol. They are legacy of what the wine industry regards as a draconian and discriminatory law, the Californian legislation known as Proposition 65.

The Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, Proposition 65 was sold to the voters as a clean water bill, with the stated aim to ensure the purity of the Californian drinking water supplies and atmosphere. Who wouldn’t vote for it? Patently a sound and sensible thing, and little wonder it achieved the demanding voting requirements to be made law, a law that cannot be modified by the Californian Governor or legislators.

But it struck bad, in a way that Professor Vern Singleton of the Department of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis, and perhaps the world’s leading wine chemist today, describes as premeditated and cynical. The same bill has now resulted in the preparation of a list of 307 substances named as reproductive toxins or carcinogens. If used in a commercial fashion, their presence needs to be displayed to any potential customers. Alcohol is one of those substances, which now in California, apparently qualifies on both counts.

Clean-living private Californian citizens are encouraged to ‘dob in’ occasions where the correct hazard sign is not displayed, with the enticement of 25 of the $US2500 fine per day per person exposed to the hazard. Someone could get very rich doing this! Persons are assumed guilty until proven innocent if spotted, a clear reversal of the principles of western justice.

But how were these toxic substances selected in the first place? According to Proposition 65, a carcinogen is any substance that will cause a single additional cancer per 100,000 people exposed to the substance throughout a lifetime, a category into which this typewriter undoubtedly fits as well. A reproductive toxin is defined as a substance or fluid sold at one-thousandth of the level to which it is known to cause no toxic effect.

Five drops of table wine is enough to exceed this level. I wonder how many drops of Adelaide water it would take? Certainly, as Professor Singleton doubts, many Mediterranean countries would hardly have produced a normal child in decades, should these levels above be accurate.

Thankfully no-one in Australia has sought an equivalent to Proposition 65, but the vested interests of bombastic do-gooders are looming nigh. Anyone contemplating its equivalent here should receive a one-way ticket to San Francisco, where they will surely choke on the air, become poisoned by the water, get cancer from the impurities of the excellent Napa Valley wines and, thanks to the birth deformities caused by every glass their expectant partner is drinking, produce a family of birth defects bearing an uncanny resemblence to Jimmy Swaggert. Please login to post comment