Drink History Canada

This has been a busy week on the booze limits front. I have been doing a lot of media, responding to a lot of email, (writing a lot of blog posts) and fielding a lot of requests for meetings. I also have a day job teaching students and doing research that isn’t about drinking limits. (I laughed when someone suggested I must be paid by the liquor industry. My only funding to do this comes from my job, and I think sometimes my dean wonders what I’m doing; but to be fair, my-end-of-the-day beer or two funds the liquor industry, so there is that).

Anyway, all that to say I’m tired and don’t have a lot of time to write anything. I am instead going to post something I’ve used to illustrate the type of distortions that are so blatant in the CCSA’s report that it makes you wonder how they thought we wouldn’t see it. It is based entirely upon the data they provide. You don’t even need to look at the studies they are using; it is based on the information that they thought they were providing in the best way to support their claims. But it does not. It reveals fundamental contradictions, and is an indicator of how ideologically driven research can trip on its own misinformation.

Feel free to distribute this. It should provide some skepticism, and encourage others to parse the numbers. In the next little while I’ll dig a bit into the fine print and the limitations, which, had they been up front, would probably have made people disregard the guidelines outright.

Note these are extracted from pages 8, 25 and 26 of the final report .