There are actual health benefits to moderate alcohol consumption, unlike cigarettes where any minuscule health benefits claimed by proponents are vastly overshadowed by the dangers to health. You can smoke one pack of cigarettes and the tar lodged in your lungs could trigger mutation even 10 years later. There is no "safe dose" for cigarette smoking. There aren't thousands of known poisons in beer that are deliberately added to increase addiction. I fully support regulating tobacco as well as bans on public smoking. Cigarettes are a danger to society even more so than 100 years ago because of how they are formulated. Even if people were just smoking plain tobacco leaves like they used to, I would have much less of a problem with that than I do manufactured cigarettes.
Alcohol in small doses (like one beer or a glass of wine with supper) has some benefits to the body. One reason is that you are introducing a small amount of a foreign toxin into the body. Your liver reacts by purging it, but in doing so it also purges other stored toxins through urination and bile. Alcohol in small doses basically kicks your body's detoxing process into high gear. So the net effect is that your body is less toxic. If you get hammered, then you are doing more damage to your body and the net risk is much higher, such as to your liver and brain.
My main problem with alcohol advertising is that it focuses a lot on the partying aspect of drinking, which involves excess that hurts your body. We don't often see commercials that show couples sitting down to dinner and having a beer or glass or wine (which is actually quite romantic!), or drinking in a more casual way. We only see the party aspect because it encourages people to consume more which means they buy more, and as a side effect, party culture and drinking have become synonymous.
I disagree that advertising only boils down to private ventures and personal choices. Even if you don't drink, advertising affects society and culture. In the 1950's doctors were prescribing cigarettes for sore throats and for women that tended to give birth to large babies (nicotine stunts fetal growth). It was considered the norm for men to smoke and it was very pervasive. Once the tobacco industry was debunked and the proof became widespread, smoking declined sharply, and part of that is that advertising cigarettes was illegalized. Thanks to that, my generation is free of the notion that "real men smoke", and I don't have to risk cancer to gain social acceptance.
I agree with this illegalization for the health of society, but alcohol is less certain.
(and so are cigs... goddamn I want a cig)
