Cigarettes are good for your throat, according to advertisements from half a century ago. Today such claims are unthinkable, as smokers face despiteful stares of contempt whenever they light up. Die-hards (顽固派) apart, society now accepts the huge damage to health caused by smoking, both to smokers themselves and to others through passive smoking - a change in attitudes with huge benefits for public health.
Now the World Health Organization is launching the first global war against alcohol abuse. Can it replicate (重复) the success of the anti-smoking campaign
Some of the ways to curb excessive alcohol consumption are similar to those used against cigarettes, such as increasing taxes and reducing availability. And as with cigarettes, there may also be scope for drinking less glamorous through clampdowns on marketing and advertising.
We have argued that these kinds of policies should be drawn up on the basis of evidence of harmfulness - to individuals and to society. But the problems of alcohol abuse have in the past been taken lightly. Excessive drinking has often been accepted, even celebrated, with hangovers (unpleasant after-effects of drinking too much alcohol) seen as entertainments that lighten the daily grind. This attitude of casual acceptance is central to the challenge facing the WHO. It obscures a problem which killed 2.4 million people in 2004, half the toll of smoking, and is estimated to be behind 20 to 30 per cent of cases of cirrhosis of the liver (a chronic disease of the liver), killing and motor-vehicle accidents.
The first line of attack, as with smoking, will be to get everyone to accept that alcohol abuse takes a huge toll. We need to erase the jolly caricature (讽刺画) of the town drunk who occasionally falls off his seat.
The WHO argues that we should borrow another aspect of the anti-smoking message and regulate so-called "passive drinking" - the effect on others of a person consuming alcohol - pointing to the role it plays in violence, family breakdown and road deaths. But "passive drinking" is a misleading term. While drinking is like smoking in that it causes collateral damage (附带损伤), no one else can passively consume the alcohol drunk by another. Any harm results from a drinker’s actions, not exposure to the substance itself.
Talk of passive drinking deviates attention from a more shocking aspect of the problem. The overall harm caused by alcohol is greater than that caused by LSD (an illegal drug) or ecstasy, and not far behind cocaine. When society stops thinking of alcohol as relaxing drink and regards it as another drug, that will signal the biggest change in thinking of all.
Which of the following measures has been taken by WHO to restrict alcohol abuse