(WTVR) - So now inmates are suing alcohol manufacturers, blaming them for making them lawbreakingly drunk, stupid and dangerous.
The five Idaho inmates want a cool billion from big beer wine and booze makers, saying they weren’t warned of alcohol’s addictiveness. Read the full story here.
Sound ridiculous?
Just as silly as smokers winning millions from cigarette manufacturers.
And when it comes to glamorizing a dangerous product, the alcohol industry makes the cigarette folks look like punks.
Look, alcohol - ETOH – is a drug, a dangerous deadly drug. Unlike tobacco and heroin addicts, who harm and kill mainly themselves, drunks put everybody at risk.
The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, lists alcohol as the most harmful drug among the 20 worst, beating out crack cocaine and heroin.
Besides contributing to an estimated 50 percent of all criminal acts that lead to incarceration, alcohol contributes to car crashes, falls, spousal abuse, unwanted pregnancies, deaths by overdose, suicides, missed time at work and many expensive and deadly diseases.
Not to mention millions of nightly acts of glaring lunacy and promiscuousness.
And yet the Virginia ABC came out this past week, touting last year’s record sales and profits, accepting the crown as the state’s leading drug dealer.
That’s sort of like methamphetamine cookers taking a bow for a surge in the “faces of meth.”
Of course, alcohol is a legal product, just like tobacco. And like tobacco, alcohol delivers lip-smacking tax revenues.
You know, back before their were cars, cowboys knew tobacco was deadly. They called cigarettes coffin nails.
These Idaho inmates also had to know alcohol is horribly addictive and dangerous.
Their case, of course, will be laughed out of court.
But eventually, alcohol makers – and down the road, fast food chains - will get the same treatment as big tobacco in a society that wants somebody else to pay for our own bad decisions and weaknesses.
That’s my take. Please leave yours here at WTVR.com
