Earlier this week, local Joplin businessman Jon Thomas Buck proposed that the Joplin City Council ban the sale and distribution of mini bottles of liquor.

Buck wants Joplin to follow the “nip ban” as adopted in the Boston area.

When asked about the proposal, Buck said, “We all know Joplin has struggled with issues related to litter and cleanliness in recent years. … One of the biggest culprits is the abundance of these small, single-serving bottles of alcohol. They are often consumed on the go and then discarded without a second thought, contributing to unsightly and unhealthy conditions in our city.”

But Joplin residents must ask themselves: Is this a good justification for banning what is essentially a small version of an otherwise legal product? The answer is no.

A mini-bottle ban is just another encroachment from the nanny state, this time aimed at adult consumers who prefer smaller bottles because they are convenient, ultimately punishing drinkers who want small serving sizes.

For public health, there is little evidence to suggest that prohibition of smaller-sized products works, certainly not from a harm reduction angle. If Joplin does go down the road of banning mini bottles, consumers will ultimately make one of two choices in response. The first is that they will buy these convenient bottles beyond Joplin’s city limits. This is obviously irritating for consumers and problematic for Joplin retailers as this motion tilts the scales against them.

The alternative to buying mini bottles elsewhere is, ironically, buying larger bottles of alcohol. It is hard to see how fewer alcohol-related incidents will arise from a policy that mandates consumers buy bottles of liquor 3 ounces or larger. Imagine trying to curb obesity by mandating that no meal can be fewer than 800 calories?

By stomping on convenience for consumers, Buck’s motion will actually end up nudging drinkers to larger bottles, and the possibility of more consumption and more alcohol-related incidents. This is a lose-lose scenario.

The second major critique of mini bottles is disposal. Because they are small, too many drinkers dispose of them by simply throwing them out on the street. Of course, this is unacceptable. There are laws against littering, and they need to be enforced. But surely the City Council can identify a problem that needs to be solved without deferring to prohibitionist policies? Other options, such as the expansion of trash bins on city streets or more by-law litter enforcement, should be exhausted before going down the route of a complete ban of a product consumers clearly love.

Those who support the ban highlight that because these bottles are small, they are virtually impossible to recycle. Some municipal websites across the United States explain that they often fall through the cracks of the sorting machines, and thus should be put in your trash bag as opposed to being recycled.

This is only true using dated machinery and recycling technology. Through chemical depolymerization, the repurposing of the bonds in plastics, virtually all plastic can be recycled. Take for example Alterra Energy in Ohio. Their advanced recycling plant takes in 40-50 tons of hard to recycle plastics (like mini bottles) and transforms them back into the building blocks for new plastic production, extending the life cycle of these hard to recycle plastics indefinitely.

Is Buck trying to reinvent the wheel of prohibition?

The prohibition of alcohol 100 years ago failed. The mindset of banning products that were deemed a nuisance caused more harm than good, which is why alcohol was then legalized.

Prohibition always promises results, but ends up creating a long list of negative second-order effects, many of which are worse than the initial issue of substance use.

Buck’s campaign to treat us all like children when it comes to the purchase of nips is going to have all the glory, majesty and success of previous prohibitions. The nip ban motion should be thrown in the trash can, along with your empty nips.

Originally published here

Early in March, Boston city councilor Ricardo Arroyo filed a motion to ban the sale and distribution of  mini bottles of liquor, aka nips.  Arroyo wants Boston to follow the nip ban as adopted in Newton, Chelsea, Falmouth, Wareham and Mashpee.

When asked about the proposal, Arroyo said the small bottles often end up as litter and that by banning these bottles Boston will experience fewer alcohol-related incidents.

But Bostonians must ask themselves: is this a good justification for banning what is essentially a small version of an otherwise legal product? The answer is no. The nip ban is just another encroachment from the nanny state, this time aimed at adult consumers who prefer nips because they are convenient, ultimately punishing drinkers who want small serving sizes.

For public health, there is little evidence to suggest that prohibition of smaller-sized products works, certainly not from a harm reduction angle. If Boston does go down the road of banning nips, consumers will ultimately make one of two choices in response. The first is that they will buy these convenient bottles beyond Boston’s city limits. This is obviously irritating for consumers, and problematic for Boston retailers as this motion tilts the scales against them.

The alternative to buying nips elsewhere is, ironically, buying larger bottles of alcohol. It is hard to see how fewer alcohol-related incidents will arise from a policy that mandates consumers buy bottles of liquor 3 ounces or larger. Imagine trying to curb obesity by mandating that no meal can be less than 800 calories?

By stomping on convenience for consumers, Arroyo’s motion will actually end up nudging drinkers to larger bottles, and the possibility of more consumption and more alcohol-related incidents. This is a lose-lose scenario.

The second major critique of nips is disposal. Because they are small, too many drinkers dispose of them by simply throwing them out on the street. Of course, this is unacceptable. There are laws against littering, and they need to be enforced. But surely the city council can identify a problem that needs to be solved, without deferring to prohibitionist policies? Other options, such as the expansion of trash bins on city streets, or more by-law litter enforcement, should be exhausted before going down the route of a complete ban of a product consumers clearly love.

Those who support the ban highlight that because these bottles are small, they are virtually impossible to recycle. Municipal websites across the state explain that they often fall through the cracks of the sorting machines, and thus should be put in your trash bag as opposed to being recycled.

This is only true using dated machinery and recycling technology. Through chemical depolymerization, the repurposing of the bonds in plastics, virtually all plastic can be recycled. Take for example Alterra Energy in Ohio. Their advanced recycling plant takes in 40-50 tons of hard to recycle plastics (like nips) and transforms them back into the building blocks for new plastic production, extending the life cycle of these hard to recycle plastics indefinitely.

Is Councilor Arroyo trying to reinvent the wheel of prohibition? The prohibition of alcohol 100 years ago failed. The mindset of banning products that were deemed a nuisance caused more harm than good, which is why alcohol was then legalized. The prohibition of cannabis in Massachusetts failed, as well.

Eventually legislators learned that the consequences of criminalizing cannabis were far worse than the harms associated with cannabis use. Prohibition always promises results, but ends up creating a long list of negative second-order effects, many of which are worse than the initial issue of substance use.

Councillor Arroyo’s campaign to treat us all like children when it comes to the purchase of nips is going to have all the success of previous prohibitions. The nip ban motion should be thrown in the trash can, along with your empty nips.

Originally published here

Dramatic shift in alcohol consumption guidelines could undermine the ultimate goal of harm reduction

More than 100 years ago temperance organizations promoting total abstention from alcohol and ultimately prohibition were a force to be reckoned with in Canada. Luckily for Canadians, sanity ultimately won out and alcohol was legalized in all provinces in the 1920s. Temperance societies may now seem like a thing of the past but there is a growing movement of lobby groups carrying the same banner under a different name.

Take, for example, the Canadian Centre for Substance use and Addiction (CCSA). Just this month it released a new report on alcohol that concluded that consuming more than two alcoholic beverages per week could seriously jeopardize your health. Yes, according to the CCSA, anything more than two beers in a seven-day period is cause for concern.

The CCSA’s new proposed alcohol guidelines are a radical departure from existing guidelines, which state that adults can consume upwards of 15 drinks per week for men and 10 drinks per week for women without serious danger to their health. Based on pre-pandemic data, upwards of 85 per cent of Canadian drinkers consume responsibly, according to these guidelines. Fifteen per cent of drinkers do not, however, and their problem drinking is obviously cause for concern.

The CCSA’s drastically lower guidelines for alcohol consumption will target many more than the 15 per cent of drinkers who regularly exceed the current standards. In terms of realistic public outcomes, it would be far better to focus on the relatively small number of people who struggle with serious alcohol abuse rather than to shift the goalposts so much that virtually all alcohol consumers in Canada become problem drinkers overnight.

In fact, shifting the standard so dramatically could undermine the ultimate goal of harm reduction: guidelines so divorced from the everyday experience of Canadians likely will be ignored by alcohol consumers across the country.

Another CCSA suggestion is a new “standard drink” label for alcohol. Different types of alcoholic beverage would carry labeling indicating how many such standard drinks were in each container. At first glance, this may seem to make sense, especially if the pandemic has warped many consumers’ views of what qualifies as one drink.

On the other hand, a drink’s impact will vary from person to person and situation to situation. Even for the same individual, alcohol’s impact can vary depending on how tired they are, their hydration or whether they have eaten recently. A standardized drink metric might well provide many drinkers with a false sense of security, especially regarding impaired driving. Consumers might believe that consuming two drinks at a bar leaves them able to drive when in fact the impact of those two drinks varies significantly depending on circumstances. Moreover, alcohol sold in Canada already indicates the volume and percentage of alcohol, which are clearly defined scientific metrics, on the bottle.

Beyond the merits of CCSA’s recommendations, there are obvious problems with the policy model in which government funds organizations whose purpose is to lobby government for policy changes. The CCSA is almost entirely funded by the federal government. How strange it is, in this post-Prohibition age, that the government funds a group whose mission is to discourage even moderate alcohol consumption. As Professor Sylvain Charlebois has pointed out, it’s like giving vegan organization PETA money to do a report on beef consumption in Canada. There’s not much suspense regarding what the report will say.

We know that the pandemic — specifically being home-bound for the better part of two years — shifted Canadians’ patterns of alcohol consumption. But the response to a 100-year pandemic is hardly justification for caving in to the new temperance lobby. Expanding the nanny state and infantilizing responsible drinkers is not the answer to any problem.

Originally published here