Wednesday
Big government is bad (when it's banning booze)
The Agitator reports that the legislatures in Illinois and Missouri are trying to ban a machine that is installed in bars and lets you ingest alcohol as a vapor, rather than a liquid. Cleverly, this vaporizer is called AWOL, Alcohol Without Liquid. After some googling, there are also proposals to ban this in Colorado, and Westchester county executive Andrew Spano is opposed to the machine as well.
The Agitator, being opposed to essentially all laws that make restrictions whose rationale is avoiding someone harming their own health, is opposed to these potential laws. I am too, but primarily because as of yet their is no evidence whether there are any new health risks with this machine that don't go with plain old alcohol. Multiple opponents claim it will lead to increased underaged drinking and drunk driving, but there is no causal mechanism proposed for how it would actually increase either of those. And, according to Wikipedia, the machine has previously been available in Europe and Asia. So if there were increases of these problems, statistics from some country or another in those two continents should be available to demonstrate the phenomenon. Oh, the most disturbing thing about this machine, at least to me, is that the people selling it claim you have to inhale the vapors for twenty minutes to get the equivalent of one shot. That's much too long to get one shot.
|
The Agitator, being opposed to essentially all laws that make restrictions whose rationale is avoiding someone harming their own health, is opposed to these potential laws. I am too, but primarily because as of yet their is no evidence whether there are any new health risks with this machine that don't go with plain old alcohol. Multiple opponents claim it will lead to increased underaged drinking and drunk driving, but there is no causal mechanism proposed for how it would actually increase either of those. And, according to Wikipedia, the machine has previously been available in Europe and Asia. So if there were increases of these problems, statistics from some country or another in those two continents should be available to demonstrate the phenomenon. Oh, the most disturbing thing about this machine, at least to me, is that the people selling it claim you have to inhale the vapors for twenty minutes to get the equivalent of one shot. That's much too long to get one shot.
