Arun,
That is interesting about the Harvard Alcohol Project. Seems I had read about this somewhere, though I may be mistaken. But I can see possible conspiracy here too, and not a conspiracy to produce an overall positive outcome, either. Let me explain:
There has been ongoing since the 1970's or maybe even before a pretty well coordinated campaign to produce in the average American a sense of isolation and even loneliness, to make his personal relationships more difficult and to cause a lesser number of informal social contacts.
The drunk driving mania, which goes back to the early 1970's is a big part of this. Now it is just much more difficult for the average Joe to gather at his club, lodge, bar or roadhouse and drink and socialize with his pals.
Maybe more importantly in terms of damaging American social cohesion, is the pressure placed on informal home gatherings, in working class neighborhoods and the part of town where the doctors and lawyers live alike.
Forty years ago in your typical American neighborhood, on weekend nights every other house would have a yard full of cars and a kitchen full of couples cooking T-bone steaks and drinking liquor. This sort of thing is as American as apple pie (or was) and is now a thing of the past. It just doesn't happen any more.
Another example: As an owner of a bunch a rural property, including a place with a big creek and several good "fishing holes" I watched as over the years more and more pressure was placed upon the landowner to keep the "non-paying" public away from these sorts of "gathering places".
Now if the price of a higher quality of social cohesion is a few thousand drunk driving deaths per year I think that the price may be reasonable. And anyway, we still have about 50,000 deaths every year in car wrecks, so I don't know if there would be a price of this sort.
With the MSM I think that lots of times when they have the wind at their back anyway, they just pile on to a trend that serves some larger globalist agenda and ignore an agenda unfavorable to their purposes.
But I don't want to put too fine a point on this, I don't pretend to know everything they are about.
Slagle
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