Health Quote by John Hunter

What makes this line sting is how it smuggles a total moral veto into the clothes of a policy debate. The surface issue is narrow and modern-sounding: Sunday alcohol sales, the classic local-government fight over blue laws, commerce, and “family values.” Hunter’s move is to declare the premise illegitimate. Voting on Sunday sales is “absurd” because, in his view, alcohol isn’t a product to regulate but a contaminant to abolish. That’s not prudence; it’s jurisdictional conquest.

The rhetoric is blunt to the point of self-parody: “opposed to alcohol period.” He collapses nuance on purpose, refusing the usual compromise language (hours, age limits, licensing). The insistence that alcohol “doesn’t do anybody any good in the long run” is doing two jobs at once. It’s an appeal to consequence (public health, social decay) and a quiet accusation that any short-term pleasure or economic benefit is morally unserious. Calling it a “dangerous drug” is strategic reframing: it drags alcohol out of the realm of tradition and into the realm of pathology, where prohibition starts to sound like harm reduction.

Contextually, a figure born in 1728 sits at the hinge between older religious regulation of vice and the later, more bureaucratic language of public safety. The subtext is power: who gets to decide what counts as “good,” and whether a community’s rituals (Sunday, leisure, drink) are civic freedoms or civic threats.