In their continuing campaign to abolish free will among the human race, Britain’s socialized medicine establishment, the National Health, has come up with a drug that’s supposed to stop you from wanting more than one glass of wine or pint of beer ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nhs-pill-stop-drinkers-having-4369536 ). To quote the lead paragraph of the news story in The Mirror, “Hundreds of thousands of drinkers who down half a bottle of wine or three pints every night are to be offered a pill to cut their cravings.”
“Offered,” eh? Hey, it’s only being “offered”–it’s not like they’ve gone all Mike Bloomberg on you and forbidden you to have more than one nip before they tuck you in.
The story does not tell you what happens if you reject the “offer” of the stop-drinking drug, but we can guess. Maybe later on you trip over a loose roller skate and break your ankle; and when you try to get treatment for it, they answer, “Hmmm… Looks like you refused to take the anti-drinking pill. No treatment for you!”
“But it’s a broken ankle! It has nothing to do with drinking.”
“Sorry–we have a policy against treating antisocial types like you who won’t do what the government says is good for you.”
All right, if I drank three pints of beer–48 ounces–I’d be face-down on the floor. But since when is the government my mommy and my daddy and my nanny, to tell me what I can or can’t drink? I have no desire to drink three pints of beer at a sitting–but it’s none of their cotton-pickin’ business!
Oh, and the drug costs 3 pounds per pill; and nobody has any idea what might be the long-term effects of taking it every time you feel like having a second glass of wine.
They’ve stumbled onto a good thing, here. Maybe they can also come up with pills that will kill your desire to stay up late to watch a movie, to phone in sick to work so you can go fishing, to eat White Castles when you should be having tofu, and so on. Maybe they can shut down all our bad habits!
If they really wanted to do some good, why don’t they invent a pill that won’t let you vote for liberals or socialists?
“(A) pill that won’t let you vote for liberals or socialists.” Wouldn’t that be against their religion? How about a pill that would help them use a little logic?