Addiction. Can we actually make choices?

It would have been good to sit him down for a chat with Roy Castle. However that wouldn’t be possible because Roy Castle is dead.

If your best puts the children in danger then tough, authorities should step in.

If a child doesn’t have love, warmth, food, clothes, shelter, education, play, toys etc etc etc I’m sure we can agree that the parents are responsible.

Who do you put in charge of what should be banned then? McDonald’s sells salad, Pizza Hut sells pasta, KFC is reasonably fresh chicken. You surely can’t just lump it all together as being unhealthy and then ban advertising. Where do you stop? All the supermarkets sell cheap frozen food, should their advertising be banned? Once you start down that line, any business that employs cheap third world labour? Investment from less than salubrious governments?

OK going off topic there but there are many better reasons to ban far more problematic businesses and products than consuming too much makes you fat.

The state of course, after some hard thinking and democratic deliberations.

Honestly, it would be a relief for me to get rid of these giant posters with two meters high big macs, looking like big mountains of plastic. Seeing those always makes me want to puke… :nauseated_face:

Same for all those sugar-rich drinks like Coke etc. We know by now that sugar is a hard drug which, if taken in excess, leads to illnesses. Don’t prohibit them, but cut out the advertisement.

And sweets, cakes, chocolates, biscuits etc etc etc?

Same.

Cars kill people if mis-used. Do you just not like adverts? Your logic is leading to every billboard being covered in pictures of vegetables and I know some carrots who have very strong opinions on the subject.

Dog food should go to then as dogs do actually kill people:

It’s a good idea to prohibit advertisement for cars. I hadn’t thought about it, but I’m all for it! :+1:

I wouldn’t put dog food in the same bracket though, as casualties from dog attacks are comparatively low. A lot more people die from sugar than from dogs. And you don’t get addicted to your dog as far as I can tell, but I have no dog myself, so can’t state that with certainty. :wink:

But maybe we could envisage a world without any advertisement? In my eyes, it would be progress.

An underappreciated factor in the roll out of the first and second generation smoking bans in the US were the restaurant trade groups. For most chain type places, the businesses these groups represent, their business model is based on turning tables quickly and frequently. They realized that eliminating the after dinner cigarette, a period of time in which the table is not generating any new revenue, allowed them to turn their tables quicker. Once public health groups started getting traction on the idea of public bans these trade groups threw a ton of money behind the idea so they could employ the bans without having to take the heat from the customers who didn’t like it.

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Clearly you don’t run your own business.

Just a pointless little tale. Jnr was born in the week that smoking in pubs was banned. When we finally got to wet the babies head, we all had a cigar on the last day you could legally do it in a pub.

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Assuming you are talking about Opioids for pain, the issue here is not nanny state prohibition, but prescribing practice more in line with their clinical utility. The drastic cut back we’re seeing is not just to help manage addiction issues, but a recognition that they really don’t work to treat the sort of long standing chronic pain issues they were previously so commonly prescribed for.

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I actually do. :wink: :laughing:

What I’m on about is obviously the global-scale advertisement, the one which consumes billions annually in order to trap people into new addictions (the topic of this thread).

The smaller-scale advertisement to get known as a business and show what you can do for potential clients is totally ok, and even useful.

One things for sure, some of the argumentative reasoning in this thread is incredibly unhelpful.

For fast food, well, there already exists the FSA traffic light system labelling. Extend this to all foods and then you have a very simple guide as to what can be advertised and what can’t red = no, green = yes, orange = one or the other, i don’t really know or care. The point is it’s a very simple way to decide. If a company like Mcd’s or KFC want to advertise their new burger, that’s fine, the onus is on them to ensure it meets a minimum standard of nutrition/low sugar content.

Yeah it’s useless for long standing due to the tolerance, however very effective for short term (surgery, breaks, etc). The issue in Canada is that family dr will not prescribe, which means you need to go to a specialist, which means you need to wait for at least a month in pain due to the long waiting times for specific specialist (by that time you probably out of pain, but the issue persists). This started with addicts going to emergency for nerve pain (you can’t detect it using X-ray, ultrasound), and then getting a prescription. It’s essentially fucked it up for anyone who is in legitimate short term pain and that can handle these types of addictions.

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Why? We’re back to personal choice. Any sweet manufacturer is then doomed by your reasoning. If there’s nutritional info on the package and even a traffic light system for the hard of thinking, what’s the problem?

No they’re not doomed. Believe it or not, people will still buy sweets even if they aren’t advertised on tv.

The point of mentioning the traffic light system was a simple and definable method by which you can decide which foods can be advertised and which can’t. It’s that simple.

I’m not even advocating for it, just saying it isn’t the impossible task you trying to make out that it was.

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I don’t think it’s impossible, I don’t think it’s justified. I’m very much in the camp of allowing people to make their own decisions, not being told what to do and think by the government and it’s draconian rules.

But here’s where this line of thinking breaks down.

In your scenario they should be able to advertise Coca Cola and leave it up to the individual to decide if they want to drink it or not.

In the scenario you don’t want, Coca Cola are not allowed to advertise. The individual is still allowed to decide if they want to drink it or not. Nobody’s rights have been impinged, nobody has been told what to do.

So what exactly is the problem here?

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The problem is that you (the government) are deciding on what you can and can’t see in advertising based on what it thinks is good for you.

Hello George Orwell.