What if We Replaced Booze with Hard Drugs on Displays?

Alcohol is the deadliest of drugs...yet it's portrayed in culture as oh-so-cute

As someone who cannot drink, getting angry at alcohol is a losing game.

Just as one with a seafood allergy tunes out Red Lobster commercials and doesn’t dress in fishing gear, it would be ridiculous of me to resent every liquor reference I see. Yet, drunken signifiers are ubiquitous, and alcohol’s cultural messaging is so anodyne, it thrives inside dad puns and lighthearted hardy-hars.

I had to remind myself that statistically, alcohol is the deadliest of the drugs out there when I recently saw these for sale at the Kelowna airport gift shop:

Of course, my first question was: what kind of rube still buys this shit? I’m all for classy drinking culture — Sinatra-era highballs, family distilleries, old-world grape growers — but when did the serious endevour of drinking get watered down to something giggly?

My research into this newsletter even tipped my algorithm this direction:

I clearly don’t purchase this particular haute couture. But that doesn’t steer me clear of booze’s 80-proof wake — urban sidewalks constantly sell me the idea of alcohol as frivolous, essential, and…absolutely hilarious:

How far-fetched, then, would the other (seemingly) harder addictions look with the same flippant treatment? Would they shed light on liquor’s absurd social acceptability, or would they make us look like nitwits, blind to addiction’s cost? If anything, this change-up might clarify that substance use disorder doesn’t discriminate, no matter the substance. And that drugs maybe don’t make for cute sayings and souvenirs.

If changing a single word can change an entire idea, I hope we soon see a few of these zingers I’m workshopping: