The Fable Let’s start with a woman named Anna. She’s sixty-two, a retired bookkeeper, living in a modest town. Her apartment faces the main street. From her window, she can see the local hardware store, the shuttered warehouse on the corner, and the gray transformer box that hums with the town’s power supply. Anna drinks…
For decades, public health messaging on alcohol has focused almost exclusively on quantity: standard drinks per day, low‑risk weekly totals, and blood alcohol concentration limits. This “quantity control” paradigm assumes that risk scales predictably with volume consumed. However, a growing body of behavioral science suggests that context and structure — not just how many drinks…