Tenets of the New Puritans (2)

The third and fourth of my 2011 blog posts on the nanny state

Following on from Monday’s post here are the next two of my old blog posts. The first is mostly about food (the clown in the headline is Ronald McDonald) while the second is about treating lifestyle choices as illness.

Tenets of the New Puritans #3: Healthy living, hedonism and the curse of the clown

In appreciating the ideology of the New Puritans we have to understand first that these are not bad people hell bent on destroying our pleasures. Rather they believe – fervently in many cases – that it is those very pleasures that are destroying us and damaging society. It is as the only song goes:

Cigarettes and Whisky and wild wild women
They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane
Cigarettes and Whisky and wild wild women
They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane

To which sins we must now add the humble hamburger:

We worry so much about the many dangers to our children, like drugs and pedophiles and violence. But we often take for granted what might very well be the largest danger of all to our kids: the hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year on ads designed to get them hooked on junk food.

That's why I think it's important that this week more than 550 health professionals and organizations signed an open letter to McDonald's, imploring the fast food giant to stop marketing junk food to kids.

We have to understand the mindset of those “550 health professionals and organisations” since they are the shock troops of New Puritanism. And what they want is for us to adopt their ideology of “healthy living”. And a great deal of resource is invested in promoting this ideology through the health service and through local councils

In this section you will find a number of improvement tools, examples of good practice and case studies that address issues of health inequalities and health improvement. The information is divided into subject areas and includes those with high impact and high importance on the current government agenda. We showcase successful case studies from across all sections of the health improvement and health inequalities agenda - from smoking and teenage pregnancy to sexual health and the built & natural environment.

So say the LGID – the ‘improvement and development’ arm of the Local Government Group (what used to be the LGA). And goes on to provide hundreds of examples of what local councils and their ‘partners’ are doing – much of it good advice, some of it excellent and impactful but all of it entirely wedded to the New Puritan ideology of ‘healthy living’.

The problem isn’t that good diet, exercise and moderate behaviour are being promoted but that things that fall outside the ‘healthy living’ prescription – alcohol, “fatty foods”, salt and fizzy drinks – are condemned outright. Hence the letter from those “550 health professionals and organisations”. And such condemnation does not require good evidence but instead just two things – the fact that consumption is a pleasure and the suggestion, ideally from a doctor or “healthy living expert”, that that consumption might be bad for you.

Armed with these two findings, the New Puritans set about persuading the authorities to start controlling these bad pleasures:

‘We really need to be careful about when these adverts are being shown.

'A 9pm watershed for junk food adverts would ensure that they are banned from not just children's programmes during the day but programmes shown at night where families view them together.
'Parents also need to limit their children's screen time and talk to them about the motives behind advertising.'

Britain is said to be on the brink of an obesity epidemic.

The last line – unsupported by evidence, baldly stated – shows how the New Puritans are winning the argument. This is not prohibition but control and such regulation is needed to protect society from that obesity epidemic (as if getting fat is something that we can catch). This will be followed by calls for stronger labelling, health warnings and other elements of the New Puritan “denormalisation” strategy.

And remember, New Puritans are not evil, they are pleasant people who care deeply about society. They are holding out against decadence and hedonism – seeking to protect us from our actions. Importantly, we are infantilised – powerless in the face of advertising’s might and the corruption of “big business”. By accepting that we are unwilling puppets, we allow the New Puritans space to promote another of their beliefs – that the ‘wrong’ lifestyle choices can be cured by doctors. That sin should be medicalised, that the sinner is a victim of “Big Tobacco”, the “Beerarchy” or “the Evil Clown”

I will look at corporate backing for New Puritanism on another occasion but remember that this is now – since the capture of the NHS by New Puritans – a massive, successful and expanding industry supported by multi-million pound public budgets. So it is no surprise that big industries such as pharmaceuticals are at the forefront of the attack on booze, fags and hamburgers.

The idea of “healthy living” seems harmless yet has become the soft smiling face of the New Puritan mission – a mission to “denormalise” those unapproved pleasures. Most importantly, the New Puritan sees what we eat as a mean to an end – to a “healthy life”. Food as pleasure, indulgence, as a joy isn’t acceptable – if we are to get pleasure from food is should be from knowing we eat only that which is “good for us”. For the New Puritan, all aspects of our lifestyle must be purposeful and eating a McDonald's or grabbing a Snickers from the countline is not purposeful – such hedonism has to be stopped:

A new Food Commission campaign will call for supermarkets, grocery stores and pharmacies to stop displaying snacks at the checkouts and to put such products out of temptation's reach.

While we have yet to reach the point where one taste of cheap chocolate or one hamburger leads inexorably to a squalid death from heroin addiction, the message remains that such things are indulgent and dangerous – and there are healthy alternatives!

Tenets of the New Puritans #4: Bad lifestyle is an illness - and the doctors can help you

Part of the New Puritan attack on our lifestyle choices depends on the characterisation of us – or those of us who choose to smoke, drink and eat fatty, salt-laden foods – as victims rather than as free individuals making personal choices.

Tobacco companies spend billions of dollars every year to get children and teens to use tobacco. They need 5,000 new smokers everyday, because some smokers quit or die. Today your child learned how advertising tries to get youth to smoke.

And…

Disturbing new marketing methods are being deployed by food firms to ensure youngsters develop an appetite for products high in salt, sugar and fat.

Or…

Add to these other forms of advertising (magazine ads, billboards, Web sites and brand-related clothing and products), signage at sporting events, sponsorship of sports and TV & radio programs....... and most young people will have seen approximately 100,000 alcohol ads by the time they turn 18.

The message is clear, the companies that make cigarettes, brew and distil alcohol and sell hamburgers are enticing us into dangerous addictions. The sheer weight of advertising leaves us with no choice, we are drawn inexorably towards these products and the counter-weight of health promotion and protection does not work. We are victims, we are ill.

This means, of course, that there is an answer – not just the regulation and control of the companies serving us with bad habits but the development, indeed the medicalisation, of these sad addictions. This has been dubbed the Nutt Solution after the former government drugs advisor of that name.

Professor Nutt doesn’t like alcohol:

Last week I attended a discussion group chaired by the Observer's health correspondent Denis Campbell where one of the other experts, a public health doctor, asserted that alcohol should be treated differently from tobacco (and by inference other drugs) because there is no safe dose of tobacco whereas alcohol is safe until a person's drinking gets to "unsafe" levels. Its health benefits for the cardiovascular system are also often used to support the claim that in low doses alcohol is safe, for how else could it be health-promoting?

The myth of a safe level of drinking is a powerful claim. It is one that many health professionals appear to believe in and that the alcohol industry uses to defend its strategy of making the drug readily available at low prices. However, the claim is wrong and the supporting evidence flawed.

Which on the face of it doesn’t fit well with his supposedly liberal views on drugs:

Nutt had criticised politicians for "distorting" and "devaluing" the research evidence in the debate over illicit drugs.

Arguing that some "top" scientific journals had published "horrific examples" of poor quality research on the alleged harm caused by some illicit drugs, the Imperial College professor called for a new way of classifying the harm caused by both legal and illegal drugs.

Until you realise that people like Professor Nutt want the medical profession to control the distribution of ‘drugs’ (and such people include alcohol and nicotine in this distribution). And Professor Nutt actively promotes misinformation about alcohol through education:

The teaching module shows the students how the drinks industry makes its own voluntary codes and them blatantly ignores them. It shows how the Portman Group [that has responsibility for alcohol education] whilst appearing to be concerned about alcohol harm is actually dominated by the drinks industry. Also it is revealed that the public health message in the UK is left to the drinks industry. The myths surrounding alcohol are discussed and then the students are asked to make up their own mind about the issues. Profit motives of the drinks industry, the tax income and political agendas are exposed and compared with the cost to society, mortality and shortening of life caused by alcohol use.

Professor Nutt is the most prominent figure – there are others such as former Liberal Democrat MP, Evan Harris – in a campaign to liberalise drugs laws and tighten laws on drinking so as to, in effect, medicalise the distribution. A process we see beginning to happen with smoking:

The parliament in Reykjavik is to debate a proposal that would outlaw the sale of cigarettes in normal shops. Only pharmacies would be allowed to dispense them – initially to those aged 20 and up, and eventually only to those with a valid medical certificate.

The important fact here is that, with drug distribution under the control of doctors, it opens up the market for pleasure drugs to the pharmaceuticals industry. Indeed, the market for nicotine replacement therapy worldwide already exceeds £3bn – and we can expect this to increase substantially as the industry targets countries such as China, India and Indonesia.

It is but a short step from this position with smoking (and no doubt currently illegal drugs) to a similar position on alcohol – registered addicts only able to purchase alcohol with a doctor’s certificate. And a new market for “alcohol replacement therapies” produced and marketed by the big pharmaceuticals businesses.

In the food industry this process of medicalisation is already well advanced – witness all the adverts telling us of Omega 3, good bacteria and reduced cholesterol plus the enormous market for vitamin supplements. Again the medical profession has attacked these adverts – not because the products are unhealthy but because they amount to self-prescription. We can see the EU’s regulation of vitamin products as part of this process with doctors and the pharmaceuticals industry combining with government to destroy a successful industry that competes with them.

Some of the most popular vitamin and mineral pills are likely to be banned after a vote in the European Parliament this week.

The vote, on Tuesday, is expected to put the finishing touches to a new EU law designed to crack down on the sale of the pills. Critics say that the law – which has already been approved by EC governments, including Britain, and the European Commission – will plunge countless people into distress, and put hundreds of health food shops out of business.

The law – which opponents believe is being pushed through at the behest of multinational drug companies wanting to stamp on competition from alternative products – is being promoted by the commission as a safety measure. But the commission itself admits that "scientific research has recently established real or potential benefits to health" that could result from some of them.

We see in this how the message of “safety” combines with the interests of powerful lobbies (the medical profession and pharmaceuticals) and the desire of New Puritans to ensure pleasure is purposeful.  And at the core of this is the view, put forward by Professor Nutt, that some people are addicts, trapped into dependence from their first drag or their first sip:

Although most people do not become addicted to alcohol on their first drink, a small proportion do. As a clinical psychiatrist who has worked with alcoholics for more than 30 years, I have seen many people who have experienced a strong liking of alcohol from their very first exposure and then gone on to become addicted to it. We cannot at present predict who these people will be, so any exposure to alcohol runs the risk of producing addiction in some users.

Note that the good professor wraps his bias up in science – there is no evidence to support his contention – and plays the “I’m a doctor” card to provide support for his mission against alcohol. These potential addicts – who could be anyone – require protection and, since we don’t know who they are, everyone is at risk. Ergo everyone should be protected – alcohol, like cigarettes, must be controlled.

By the doctors of course!