Tags: The Sting

What better way to endure a wet January than taking part in Dry January?

Calling someone an old soul says they’re wise before their time.

In the 1960s, whenever a commercial flight passed over Alberta airspace, the plane would stop serving alcohol until it was safely flying above BC or Saskatchewan. This was because Alberta’s Bible-belting government was also a teetotalling one, and to the Social Credit Party airspace meant drinkspace meant sin.

Flash forward to 2013 when a British charity, Alcohol Change UK, launched its first “Dry January” campaign, asking Brits to abstain from drinking alcohol in the first month of the year. Today, Dry January has grown into a social movement that’s driven by health and financial benefits instead of religious ones.

Read on…

What you can’t measure, you can’t improve.

This is one reason the alcohol lobby is fighting so hard against instituting a common definition of “a drink” on its bottles. If that happened, people would know how much alcohol is in their glass of wine or bottle of beer.

The drinks industry is reeling. In the US last year, 20% of drinking-age Americans took part in Dry January. This year, it’s 35%. No wonder Tito’s Vodka hired Martha Stewart to create off-label ways to consume vodka. The “dry” movement is also spreading: yesterday I got an email from the Canadian Cancer Society urging me to sign up for Dry February.

To foretell the liquor lobby’s fight-back tactics, check out the following playbooks from the past: tobacco, sugar, opioids, fossil fuels and long ago, seatbelts.

Meanwhile…

RamsayWrites

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