Breaking my own avowed radio silence this evening, I was again rendered dashboard thumping with rage as two idiots vigorously debated both sides of the wrong argument. Representing academia was a stern doctor type grouping alcohol advertising and drink related illness as Satan’s killer cocktail. Smarming from the sidelines sloped a suit declaring that£800 million pounds a year bought the drinks company’s nothing but brand awareness.

They are both wrong, but that’s largely irrelevant because the whole argument is dumb. And here’s why – we have lost the ability to apply perspective to any discussion. Rational analysis has been sidelined by the non listening classes preaching at the extremes of the argument, before packaging 30 seconds of doom mongering for our sound-bite generation.

There is no respect for the other view, no attempt to persuade or influence, no chance of listening or even educating; no it’s just preachy bollocks that assumes the audience is unable or unwilling to weigh up subtle nunances, and then let them decide how they’d like to live their lives.

If we draw a straight line from cigarettes kill through alcohol kills, then let’s spear obesity with that linear progression shall we? Obesity must kill more people than alcohol, put more strain on hospitals and lose more hours of the working year. So come one, be properly radical ban all food advertising as well. No scrap that, go a bit further – because clearly we cannot be fucking trusted with anything – take all the food off the shelves and let the state decide what we eat.

Where’s the downside? Okay we’ll all be eating gruel three times a day and the Flora London Marathon’ll be looking for a sponsor, but we can switch funding from people dying by their own hand to keeping them hanging on a few more years thanks to our caring government.

And what pisses me off even more is it is just bad science. A recent report linked bowel cancer with Ham by correlating what people ate with confirmed cases of the disease. What it totally failed to account for whether these same people drank a gallon of wine a night, smoked themselves wheezy or shoved a live rat up their arse.

You cannot airily make a link – as our tweed jacketed chum did earlier – that every alcohol measure you imbibe is another irretrievable step to cancer, nor can you brush off an 80{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} increase in alcohol sales in fifteen years as insufficient data to spot a trend. But you can have an informed debate, and then let people make their own bloody minds up.

I despair sometimes I really do. You know what? I’m going to have a beer.