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LETTERS: Joseph M Barry and Tom O'Dowd Investing in alcohol is no longer responsible BMJ 2007; 334: 1235 [Full text]

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If I can choose to drink it, I can invest in it.

Phil Wright   (17 June 2007)

Harmful does not equal unethical

Robert M Venn   (21 June 2007)

If I can choose to drink it, I can invest in it. 17 June 2007
Phil Wright, Specialist Registrar The Yorkshire Deanery, LS2 9JT Send response to journal: Re: If I can choose to drink it, I can invest in it.	I am humbled by the pious investment strategy of Professors Barry and O'Dowd but feel I shall be unable to follow their lead and purge my portfolio of any company connected with the manufacture or retail of alcoholic beverages. When I entered the medical profession, I did so in the hope of making people better, even if that meant not realising the same earning potential as my academic contemporaries. In recent years I have sustained a pay cut to preserve my pension. Along with other public sector workers I have suffered a further effective pay cut in the form of a below inflation pay rise in order to maintain low inflation rates for the greater good of society. I resent the expectation that, as a chattel of society, I should attempt to influence the health of the nation by how I invest what little spare cash I have. I suspect a dentist would have no problem investing in Cadbury's or Tate & Lyle, a fireman may invest in Swan Vesta or Bryant & May. Why should I not enjoy the freedom to invest in Threshers or Moet & Chandon? Competing interests: None declared
Harmful does not equal unethical 21 June 2007
Robert M Venn, SHO Swansea SA2 8QA Send response to journal: Re: Harmful does not equal unethical	Professors Barry and O'Dowd believe that: "it is time to include the manufacture and importantly the sale of alcohol as an unworthy and unethical way of making money for the individual investor." If it is simply the sale of or profiting from alcohol that is wrong, then our duty is surely not merely to stop investing but to stop buying the stuff at all. If it is the behaviour of certain companies that they object to, then perhaps they should be asking for a specific boycott (or even mass purchase of shares for AGM votes), either way we can probably leave Moët alone. If they consider the alcohol industry to be so far beyond the pale because of the harm it's product causes, that is a different matter. We all know alcohol can do harm, even occasionally in the hands of doctors, but it does not follow that there is anything inherently immoral about it. The problems of alcohol are the problems of people, and as doctors we surely want to help them make healthy choices, not have society make their choices for them by limiting the availability of drink or anything similar, after all we trust ouselves to use it responsibly, don't we? And of course, all the while we should continue to treat the idiots who smoke, the idiots who drink, the idiots who drive too fast, the idiots who ski dangerously, and everyone else, even though it can be dispiriting. Now, should I throw away the Châtauneuf-du-Pape in disgust, or just the Foster's? Competing interests: RMV is very partial to a White Russian.