Social media also escapes product censures, despite its association with a ream of mental health issues, including addiction, alienation, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, victimisation and depression. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Public health warnings are standard features built into democracies for balancing citizens’ right to consume harmful products as an accepted personal freedom with responsible governments excusing bad choices by cautioning against their impact.
Tobacco is the gold standard for product-honest health warnings and rooted in traditions spanning organised societies from Mesopotamian civilisations through to the 21st century’s late capitalism epoch, where profit trumps humanity.
Public health warnings’ bouquet — not necessarily stamped on the product — also embraces toddler’s toys, counterfeit sexual stamina medication and high-sugar cool drinks washing down the junk and processed-food slop fuelling the global obesity and general health crisis, reflecting businesses, corporations — and risking tautology — scammers’ maximum profit-margin obsession.
A 1964 tobacco report of the US Surgeon General, America’s foremost public health agency, established that smoking caused chronic health issues, including lung cancer and heart disease.
Legally enforced tobacco health warnings evolved from the mundane, “Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health” to packaging displaying nauseating images of its consequences and proving an effective device for smokers kicking the habit.
Alcohol
Alcohol, associated with more lifestyle diseases than tobacco, has escaped meaningful health advice through its ironic status as society’s salve. Liquor’s near monopoly as a legal recreational drug, despite many banned psychotropics posing markedly less aggression and addiction risks, allows for deep roots.
Booze companies have commercial heft, political influence and a several billion in global advertising spend glamourising addiction. Alcohol’s prevalence is woven within advertising to logistics economies, as well as cocooned wine estates caressing vines with classical music sharing the same DNA as shackland shebeens.
The alcohol sector embeds a non-sequitur in its subtle health warning to “Drink Responsibly” — imbibing the drug in any quantity is a medically irresponsible act. The motif claims to nudge users towards moderation, dismissing a drug’s seductive powers for never enough, as well as absolving alcohol traders from the havoc their product wreaks.
Among alcohol’s maladies is that it is a catalyst for road carnage, domestic and sexual violence, murder and general weekend mayhem. JP Smith, Cape Town’s mayoral committee member for safety and security, in a city that is knee-deep in Tik turf wars, said in a 2022 interview: “I believe the drug that destroys our communities in our cities is plain old, cheap and nasty alcohol. By far the most destructive force.”
A five-year research project published by the South African Medical Journal in 2014, titled The Cost of Harmful Alcohol Use in South Africa, reported the “tangible and intangible” costs to the economy were about “10 to 12% of 2009 GDP”. The “tangible financial cost” was about R37.9 billion, or 1.6% of GDP. The damage, not adjusted for inflation, was not compensated by “sin taxes”.
The US surgeon general, who is recommending explicit product health warnings, tweeted on 3 January: “Consuming any type of alcohol — beer, wine or spirits — increases the risk for at least seven types of cancer, including cancers of the breast for women, colorectum, esophagus, liver, mouth, throat and voice box.”
The US agency’s change of pace — if it survives co-President Donald Trump’s “deep state” public institutions cull eviscerating what made America “great” — is lagging Ireland which is entrenching alcohol cancer warnings on a par with those for tobacco in May next year. Earlier this month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) joined the chorus insisting governments “prominently” display alcohol’s cancer hazards on labelling.
Alcohol’s harmful effects on society and individuals has long been understood but governments have shied from encrusting a trillion-dollar industry with pertinent consumer counselling and in the gap spawned public relations outfits seeding urban legends extolling the drug’s health benefits to soothe the guilt — although we know it is a lie.
A milk carton displays more content information than a bottle of whiskey or a cheeky sauvignon blanc. Slapping images on wine labels, mirroring those on tobacco products, depicting anal cancer or sclerotic livers, would face stiff resistance from the alcohol industry and predictable squealing from its financial media courtesans deriding informed choice as bad for business.
Plastic
Governments’ wilting from consumer advice on toxic products to curry corporate favour, including substances altering the species’ biology and chemistry, tilts towards monoliths having “Big” as a prefix, including agriculture, oil, pharma and tech, among other unchecked commercial dominions.
Water bottled in plastic dominated last year’s nearly $350 billion “pure” water global consumer market supplying those following “wellness” lifestyles’ need to hydrate. A 2018 WHO survey revealed more than 90% of popular bottled water brands were inorganic soups and the top-ranked containing about “10 000 plastic pieces a litre”.
Scientific research is finding it is increasingly commonplace for nano and micro plastics to float in the brain’s capillaries and corral in other vital organs, while inveigling into the unborn and men’s reproductive tools.
Dementia is suspected as one consequence of the brain’s pollution in medical investigations reviewing a host of diseases and conditions allegedly initiated by the fossil fuel industry’s plastics bonanza, which spares no species or ecosystem.
Social media
Social media also escapes product censures, despite its association with a ream of mental health issues, including addiction, alienation, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, victimisation and depression — plus diseases reawakened by the anti-vaxxer’s Kool-Aid, as well as other detrimental side effects plaguing an unknown number among the billions of adherents.
US shadow president Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was a central cheerleader shifting the Overton Window using a medium without context normalising hate speech and the gamut of Abrahamic faiths’ radicalisations — beyond the already engrained apocalyptic beliefs and outlandish happy-ever-after scripts.
Social media’s marvels and technology’s magic are ideally suited to product health warnings. Easily stitched into opening an app, it could offer Nineteen Eighty-Four author George Orwell’s wisdom when climbing into Musk’s social media sewer: “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” Or maybe too ambiguous for right-wing conspiracy theorists mangling socialist thought for their own agendas?
Perhaps a less oblique approach? “This site is populated by amateur virologists, conspiracy theorists, homophobes, misogynists, neo-Nazis, pedophiles, racists, scammers, stalkers, white supremacists and other predators cowering behind avatars. Tread with the vigilance afforded shortcuts through a cattle kraal.”
Social media speakeasies operated by the supine oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, whose principles are defined by whichever way a dollar bill blows, would have his own novel set, including: “This site [Facebook] was instrumental persuading a nation to impose economic sanctions against itself and deny its citizens’ previously unquestioned residential rights in 27 other countries. Don’t be deranged. Fact check. FFS.”
Or a nuanced product warning greeting users on another Zuckerberg social media site: “No one’s lives are close to this perfect. Their shit stinks like everyone else’s.” TikTockers would have the reassurance: “You believe it’s only China surveilling you? To plagiarise a Nobel laureate: “You’re an idiot, babe — it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.”
Back to the future
Truth Social, established by Trump after a pre-Musk Twitter banning, could convey messaging matching the founder’s grift and the intellectual capacity of the 54% of adult Americans commanding the literacy rates of a 12-year-old or younger: “Because a lie is written in all caps does not make it a fact. Why would it — unless Morons Are Governing America?”
Populist authoritarians and their billionaire buddies claim disinformation is “free speech’s” immunity card, mocking scientific evidence attesting to fossil fuels’ pivotal role in the acceleration towards the sixth mass extinction and exude the same contempt 16th-century Catholic overlords gave Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei for his Earth orbits the Sun heresy.
Legislators contemplating incorporating product health warnings on social media — with choices ranging from mental health issues to take your pick — would give democracies a fingerhold on a consumer product threatening a return to the pre-Enlightenment dungeons where superstition and ignorance trumped truth — entrenching unaccountable rule and extreme wealth’s solipsism.
Guy Oliver is a Johannesburg-based photo-journalist and permaculture consultant.