Alcohol Consumption & Mortality

Women drive only 30% of miles driven but are in 37% of the fatal accidents

Do you have occasion to use alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine or beer?

http://www.gallup.com/poll/indicators/indalcohol.asp

Feminists have been successful at destroying the family by denigrating fatherhood and characterizing all men as abusive alcoholics.   Their control of the media has fostered the belief that alcoholism is a national crisis which created our forty percent rate of fatherlessness.  The reality is that fatherlessness was caused by feminism, and that this in turn increases alcoholism.   Even so, "alcohol-related" cirrhosis deaths affect less than 0.003% of the population.  And worse, the benefits of drinking alcohol outweigh the negatives by thirty to one.

There are two ways to estimate the net benefits to a country of alcohol consumption.  One is to look at worldwide studies of the relationship between alcohol consumption and heart disease mortality rates, which show that each one ounce increase in the per capita consumption of alcohol saves 678 lives.   The other is to compare known alcohol consumption rates of countries around the world to the known life expectancies of men, which shows that each one ounce per year increase in per capita consumption of alcohol saves 377 lives.

This is data easily available on the internet.  Yet MADD has been "successful" at reducing alcohol consumption, from 2.2 to 1.8 gallons per capita.  Total US alcohol consumption today is 108 million fewer gallons than it would have been without the campaigns.   It also turned us into a totalitarian state at the same time it killed an extra 34,715 citizens.

By refusing to warn the public about the dangers of reducing alcohol consumption, and by warning the public about dangers which either don't exist or are miniscule by comparison to the benefits, the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) kills 423 times as many people each year from heart disease than it killed in Waco--not including the 150,000 lives which could be saved if we doubled alcohol consumption.

SCARE TACTICS

How did MADD convince so many agencies of the federal government to embar on a campaign which was so widely known would kill so many people?  They conducted a very effective campaign to scare people into believing many things about drinking alcohol that just aren't true:

21,000 CANCER DEATHS ARE "ALCOHOL-RELATED"

One medical source reports: "Cancer kills an estimated 526,000 Americans yearly, second only to heart disease. Cancers of the lung, large bowel, and breast are the most common in the United States. Considerable evidence suggests a connection between heavy alcohol consumption and increased risk for cancer, with an estimated 2 to 4 percent of all cancer cases thought to be caused either directly or

indirectly by alcohol". In other words, they claim that between 10,520 and 21,040 cancer deaths each year *MIGHT* be *RELATED* to alcohol.  None of the literature made the casual observation that many heavy drinkers are also heavy smokers, which is alleged to be "cancer-related".  But this ignores the casual observation that the RATE of cancer deaths per 100,000 population in the US  increased from 67 in 1990, to 149 in 1962, to 203 in 1996 http://www.cdc.gov/nchswww/data/nvsr47_9.pdf a three fold increase in the rate of cancer deaths. The Gallup Poll shows that the number of smokers decreased by 15%, from 41% to 26% between 1962 and 1996, that the number of drinkers remained almost flat during this time (60% of the drinking age population), BUT that the *rate* of cancer deaths increased 36% during that same period.  Not even the recent 18% decrease in national alcohol consumption deflected that steady century-long growth rate of cancer deaths.  This author disputes that claim as being completely unsubstantiated by widely available and reliable statistics.

7,514 CIRRHOSIS DEATHS ARE "ALCOHOL-RELATED"

Thirty percent of the 25,047 cirrhosis deaths in the US each year are determined by medical professionals to be "alcohol-related", a term which belies their reluctance to claim that alcohol causes cirrhosis.  Their quandry is that, if alcohol *caused* cirrhosis, then there wouldn't be 17,533 cirrhosis deaths which are *not* alcohol-related. If alcohol were such a significant factor, then the 60% of the population which consumes an average of 2 ounces of alcohol per day, all year long, would be more than seventy percent of those cirrhosis deaths.  The simple statistical fact is that, if 60% of the population consumes this much alcohol, but only 30% of cirrhosis deaths are "alcohol-related", then it is the non-drinkers who are at the greatest risk, if not 100% of the risk, of dying from cirrhosis.  This author cannot accept the assumption from the available data that even 7,514 cirrhosis deaths are "alcohol-related".

1,643 TRAFFIC FATALITIES ARE "ALCOHOL-RELATED"

MADD claims that half of the 41,075 auto traffic fatalities each year, or 20,538 fatalities, are "alcohol related". But reports directly from police nationwide show that 4% of all traffic accidents are "alcohol-related".  This means that a maximum of 1,643 traffic deaths are "alcohol-related", not *alcohol-caused*, which means that more than 39,432 of all traffic accidents (96% of them) are CAUSED by those with no alcohol in their blood.  Only one third of "alcohol-related" crashes involved only one driver, which means that two thirds of them involved another driver.   The odds are 20 to 1 that that other driver was a tee-totaller, which means that tee-totallers significantly increase the rate of "alcohol-related" crashes. This author asserts that the best way to recude "alcohol-related" crashes is to outlaw women drivers.

If the 43 million women who don't drink at all were to consume 1 ounce of alcohol per day, and if the 39 million men who don't drink at all were to drink 2 ounces of alcohol per day, and if the 32 million women who drink less than half an ounce of alcohol were to increase their consumption to one ounce per day, and if the 29.5 million men who drink less than 1 ounce per day were to increase their consumption to 2 ounces per day, the US would double its alcohol consumption and we would have 152,602 fewer heart disease deaths each year.  This is a 21% decrease in the heart disease mortality rate, and a 6.6% decrease in the overall US mortality rate.  This would increase the average male life expectancy of 73 years to 77.8 years, roughly equivalent to Australia and Japan.

Each one ounce increase in annual per capita alcohol consumption saves 678 lives.   Conversely, each one ounce decrease costs 678 lives.

This predicted reduction in mortality is consistent with the international data.   For example, France consumes 69% more alcohol per capita and has a 2.5% higher life expectancy (74.8 years vs. 73 years in the US).  An 81% increase in per capita alcohol consumption in the US would be 7% higher than France and according to the studies would increase our life expectancy to 21% higher than France. Australia

consumes 10.3% more alcohol per capita and has a 5.8% higher life expectancy (77.2 years).

In spite of all these studies and existing data, based solely on demands from MADD and other liberal, feminist, & totalitarian advocates, and excluding all data and studies which contradict its contrary position, this nation implemented a public safety policy which hasn't been proven to save lives, & which uses the force of law to reduce the alcohol consumption of  Americans.  Few Americans can avoid driving on our roads and highways.  Imprisoning them, NOT for a bad traffic record, NOT for actually having an accident, but for having an arbitrary composition of alcohol in their bodily fluids on the presumption that this will cause a future accident even though the FARS data shows that on average a drinking White man who drives is one fifth as likely per mile as the average non-drinking White woman, is unconscionable, unChristian, unGodly, and unconstitutional.

References:

1. Dr. Thomas A. Pearson, head of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee "... if current drinkers stopped drinking, heart disease related deaths ... would increase by 80,000 each year in the U.S."
2. Physicians and scientists at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) "middle-aged men and postmenopausal women may benefit the most from moderate alcohol consumption: an approximately 30-percent reduction in risk of heart disease."
3. Major sources of alcohol-related death in the United States — such as accident, suicide, and murder — vary from society to society and are not inevitable consequences of high levels of drinking.
4. Both case comparison and cohort epidemiologic research, as well as cross-cultural analysis, have now firmly established that alcohol reduces coronary heart disease (CHD) incidence and mortality (Criqui and Ringel 1994; Gaziano et al. 1993; Klatsky et al. 1992; Rimm et al. 1991; Stampfer et al. 1988; Suh et al. 1992). Prospective epidemiological studies also find that overall mortality is reduced by moderate alcohol consumption (Boffetta and Garfinkel 1990; Doll et al. 1994; Fuchs et al. 1995; Grnb�k 1994; Klatsky 1992). These benefits occur primarily for middle-aged men and women, for whom heart disease is the primary cause of death.However, they also apply to all adults at risk for heart disease, a substantial majority of both female and male adults (Fuchs et al.1995).
5. Stanton Peele, Ph.D., an alcoholism and addiction expert from Morristown, N. J.:  In 1995 Charles Fuchs and his colleagues at Harvard found that women who drank up to two drinks a day lived longer than abstainers. Subjects were 85,700 nurses.
6. In 1995, Morten Gr�nb�k and colleagues found that wine drinkers survived longer than abstainers, with those drinking three to five glasses daily having the lowest death rate. Subjects were 20,000 Danes.
7. In 1994, Richard Doll and his colleagues found that men who drank up to two drinks daily lived significantly longer than abstainers. Subjects were 12,300 British doctors.
8. In 1992 Il Suh and colleagues found a 40 percent reduction in coronary mortality among men drinking three and more drinks daily. The 11,700 male subjects were in the upper 10 to 15 percent of risk for coronary heart disease based on their cholesterol, blood pressure and smoking status. Alcohol's enhancement of high density lipoproteins was identified as the protective factor.
9. In 1990, Paolo Boffetta and Lawrence Garfinkel found that men who drank occasionally — up to two drinks daily — outlived abstainers. Subjects were over a quarter of a million volunteers enrolled by the American Cancer Society.
10. In 1990, Arthur Klatsky and his colleagues found that those who drank one or two drinks daily had the lowest overall mortality rate. Subjects were 85,000 Kaiser Permanente patients of both genders and all races.

    These data — from large prospective studies of people of both sexes, different occupations, several nations and varying risk profiles — all point to alcohol's life-sustaining effects. This phenomenon is now so well accepted that the U.S. dietary guidelines released in January 1996 recognize that moderate drinking can be beneficial.

11. "More recently, Boffetta and Garfinkel   found that white American men who reported in 1959 that they consumed an average of fewer than three drinks per day were less likely to die during the next 12 years than men who reported abstinence."

Copyright @ 2007 by Fathers' Manifesto & Christian Party