CDC Busybodies Want You to Believe Binge Drinking and Alcohol-Fueled Sex Are Big Public Health Problems Now

Posted by Enrique on 02.01.2012

They’re here to help



Even though none of the candidates running for president (who have a chance of winning) want to talk about it, the U.S. federal government's $15 trillion debt is eventually going to necessitate those draconian cuts we keep hearing we can't bear. At some point we're going to have to bear them whether we like it or not, but in the meantime it's fun to imagine a world in which these useless government agencies don't exist and we don't have to deal with their officious, nannying proclamations anymore.

Take the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Given what we know about government naming conventions, we can be certain that whatever the CDC does, it has nothing to do with disease control or prevention. In fact, the most notable initiatives the CDC has undertaken recently have been to grossly misinform the American public about the amount of binge drinking and sexual violence that goes on here.

The story so far…


Unlike the CDC, this can prevent disease

For what it's worth, the CDC website describes its mission as "Collaborating to create the expertise, information, and tools that people and communities need to protect their health – through health promotion, prevention of disease, injury and disability, and preparedness for new health threats." I guess "sitting around, talking about stuff, and occasionally issuing bullshit reports" doesn't sound as sexy.

As far as I'm aware, there's nothing the CDC does that couldn't be accomplished by WebMD or any number of private organizations that provide information about health-related topics. There's no reason to believe the information provided by the CDC is more accurate than what you'd find via Google, and several reasons to believe the CDC's information is less accurate. After all, the CDC is not a private organization that needs to compete to earn customers, and as such it has no incentive to do a competent job.

For example, in January the CDC put out a report on binge drinking in the U.S. Like every report issued by a government agency in the history of civilization, the CDC found that binge drinking is "a bigger problem than previously thought":

More than 38 million US adults binge drink, about 4 times a month, and the largest number of drinks per binge is on average 8. This behavior greatly increases the chances of getting hurt or hurting others due to car crashes, violence, and suicide. Drinking too much, including binge drinking, causes 80,000 deaths in the US each year and, in 2006 cost the economy $223.5 billion. Binge drinking is a problem in all states, even in states with fewer binge drinkers, because they are binging more often and in larger amounts.

*Binge drinking means men drinking 5 or more alcoholic drinks within a short period of time or women drinking 4 or more drinks within a short period of time.

I don't mean to be obvious, but government agencies always exaggerate the seriousness of whatever social affliction they're talking about. It's part of justifying their existence—if X isn't a serious problem, then there would be no need for government to expand its power to combat it. Therefore, X will always be a serious problem, regardless of whether X = terrorism, income inequality, the declining influence of public employee unions, airport security, climate change, adults smoking weed, outsourcing, illegal immigration, or anything that falls under the banner of public health.

And everything is kinda sorta a public health issue, including binge drinking, which as you may have heard is a bigger problem than previously thought, even in states with few binge drinkers. It's like a goddamn binge drinking extravaganza out there, if you believe the CDC. But why should you believe the CDC?

Did anyone notice that bit about how binge drinking is defined as 5 drinks for men or 4 drinks for women consumed "within a short period of time"? Funny how they don't specify what a short period of time is. If you look at the questionnaire the CDC used, the main question about drinking is phrased as "How many times during the past 30 days did you have [5 for men, 4 for women] or more drinks on an occasion?" It doesn't ask respondents to specify the length of the occasion. If a private organization conducted such sloppy research, no one would hire it.

This binge drinking report is only the latest example of the CDC's careless, fear-mongering work. In November, the agency put out a report called The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. Like its binge drinking study, the CDC's findings on sexual violence are highly suspect. First of all, the executive summary opens with this sentence:

"Sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence are major public health problems in the United States."

WRONG. Domestic violence is a criminal justice issue, not a public health problem. See what I mean about everything being a public health issue? The report starts off on that note, and keeps making claims of dubious reliability. At one point, the CDC asserts 18.3% of all U.S. women have been raped, including "completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration." Whoa, alcohol/drug facilitated penetration counts as rape now? Half of you reading this wouldn't have been born if your parents hadn't engaged in a little alcohol/drug facilitated penetration.

In describing "stalking," the CDC reports the most commonly experienced tactics were receiving repeated "unwanted telephone calls, voice, or text messages." Christ, stalkers don't even show up at their victims' home or place of employment anymore? If most stalkers aren't even following through on the baseline qualification of following their victim, why are they classified as stalkers? Wouldn't "irritating pricks who can't take a hint" be more accurate?

The CDC also says "Nearly half of all women and men in the United States have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime." I mean, goddammit – if you've never experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner, then you've never been in love.

Writing in the Washington Post, Christina Hoff Sommers explains how out of touch with reality the CDC report on sexual violence is:

The agency's figures are wildly at odds with official crime statistics. The FBI found that 84,767 rapes were reported to law enforcement authorities in 2010. The Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey, the gold standard in crime research, reports 188,380 rapes and sexual assaults on females and males in 2010. Granted, not all assaults are reported to authorities. But where did the CDC find 13.7 million victims of sexual crimes that the professional criminologists had overlooked?

It found them by defining sexual violence in impossibly elastic ways and then letting the surveyors, rather than subjects, determine what counted as an assault. Consider: In a telephone survey with a 30 percent response rate, interviewers did not ask participants whether they had been raped. Instead of such straightforward questions, the CDC researchers described a series of sexual encounters and then they determined whether the responses indicated sexual violation. A sample of 9,086 women was asked, for example, "When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?" A majority of the 1.3 million women (61.5 percent) the CDC projected as rape victims in 2010 experienced this sort of "alcohol or drug facilitated penetration."

What does that mean? If a woman was unconscious or severely incapacitated, everyone would call it rape. But what about sex while inebriated? Few people would say that intoxicated sex alone constitutes rape — indeed, a nontrivial percentage of all customary sexual intercourse, including marital intercourse, probably falls under that definition (and is therefore criminal according to the CDC).

There's no justification for this kind of useless research, which could only be the result of an agency working without a profit motive, without shareholders or customers to hold it accountable, i.e., without any incentive to produce something of value. Can we stop kidding ourselves that agencies like the CDC somehow serve the public interest?

If the CDC does anything meaningful to control or prevent disease, it's not apparent. There's no reason to believe the elimination of the CDC would disproportionately harm the poor or minorities (the standard excuse for never cutting government "services"). We'll be just fine without it. Too bad it will probably take a default of U.S. debt before we can finally be rid of rubbish agencies like the CDC.