You Know What Your Drink Needs? Another Warning Label

Because the nannystaters haven't yet told us in every possible way that we're stupid, unruly children requiring their constant supervision, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy on Friday issued an advisory demanding cancer warning labels on drinks containing alcohol.

"Alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States — greater than the 13,500 alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities per year in the U.S. — yet the majority of Americans are unaware of this risk," Dr. Murthy announced in his press release.

Before spoiling my favorite scotch or wine bottle label with yet another warning people will drink to forget, have you tried just... you know... telling people? I think of people like Dr. Murthy every time I see a warning sticker on lawnmowers telling me not to stick my fingers where the giant spinny blade goes round and round.

It isn't that I'm unconcerned about cancer. My mom and both her parents smoked themselves to death, and I took that seriously enough to quit my pack-and-a-half-a-day habit more than 20 years ago. Since then, I've lost three close friends to three different cancers. But most anything in moderation is probably safe, and wine and other alcoholic beverages have proven health benefits — again, in moderation.

But as a general rule, we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions concerning the efficacy of all those government warning labels — and the federal government's assumed authority to mandate them.

I was in my early teens when Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) bullied record labels into putting parental advisory stickers on albums with explicit lyrics. When I was at the record store with five bucks to spend, and I'd narrowed my choices down to two, I'd pick the album with the PMRC sticker — every single time. Just like every single kid I knew.

If you're wondering where the federal government got the authority to demand labels on everything, it didn't. Washington just kind of assumed that Prohibition gave it the power to say, not just what went into bottles, but what went on them, too. Prohibition ended but the assumption never did. It grew like kudzu, too.

Then there's the science — which is never settled.

True story.

Dad was starting to open a bottle of wine at dinner when 11-year-old me mentioned a news story I'd seen that the lead cap on wine bottles could cause cancer. Without pausing his vital task, Dad said, "I saw that story. They made the mice drink the equivalent of 50 bottles [IIRC] of wine a week. If you're drinking that much, you have a more immediate problem than cancer."

"Besides," he said as he wiped the top of the open bottle with a small towel, "it's only dangerous if you don't wipe the bottle before pouring." It was a perfect little flourish that made the story embed itself in my brain and also turned me into a permanent skeptic about popular health scares.

Also, consider human nature. The first person to discover what would eventually become beer must have seen the foamy liquid fermenting on rotting grain and thought, "What the hell." It was a genuine "Hold my beer!" moment except that nobody had ever had a beer before. The point is that there's no way that first person thought that ugly mess could be good for him — yet was enticed by the smell of fermentation.

This is who we are. This is what we do.

And that's OK, so raise a glass to us.