The Words We Use and The Harms We Ignore

“Basta drink moderately.”

“Yosi break lang.”

“Mas safe naman ang vape.”

These sound like everyday phrases baked into our culture. But have you ever paused to ponder what their origins were?

Today, there is an epidemic of alcohol, vape and tobacco use among our youth, and how we talk about these products is key to understanding the problem this represents. When one in eight Filipino youth is already using tobacco, and alcohol brands spend billions seemingly targeting younger consumers, it’s worth asking: how did we end up thinking of these as just another part of life? Who taught us that ‘yosi breaks’ are initiation rites for a person to belong in groups at work or in school? Who taught us that to celebrate, “kailangan magpainom”?

In 2023, tBut what we know in the medical community is that individual choices are shaped by our environment. It’s not at all an accident that brands tell us to “drink responsibly.” That vape companies sell the idea that it’s a “healthier choice.” These phrases aren’t neutral. They are calculated, tested, and designed to make harmful products feel like a simple lifestyle choice.

Here are the words we doctors have been using: alcohol-impaired driving fatality. Alcohol use disorder. Habit-forming chemical. Early exposure to harm. E-cigarette or Vaping Product Use-Associated Lung Injury or EVALI. Alcohol-attributable cancer deaths.

It’s likely you don’t hear these terms often. The popular language around alcohol, vape, and tobacco consumption has already been programmed by decades of meticulous advertising and public relations work.

When we talk about alcohol, tobacco, and vape harms, we’re not just talking about the more than P700 billion that their consumption costs the government or the one million children aged 10-19 who are drinking alcohol.

We’re talking about the culture that makes you feel like you have to explain yourself when you don’t feel like drinking alcohol.

We’re talking about the harm that hides behind advertising campaigns designed to make substance consumption look like an essential component of adulthood.

These messages don’t come from nowhere; they come from industries that profit off harm. Industries that tell young people alcohol makes you fun, smoking makes you cool, and vaping is harmless. They push the lie that vapes are a “healthy alternative” to smoking, even though they come from the same playbook and have been linked to lung injuries, heart disease, impaired brain development among adolescents, and a higher risk of nicotine dependence. They prefer “drunk driving” instead of “drink driving,” because it leaves room for interpretation, implying that driving is still okay if you’re “just a little tipsy.”

But these aren’t just innocent choices when these products cause real, irreversible damage.

All this has made it so just seven of the biggest alcohol and tobacco companies in the Philippines ranked in the top 0.2 percent of highest-earning enterprises, raking in over P506 billion in revenue and P72.2 billion in net profit in 2022, according to analysis from Action from Economic Reforms.

When we in the medical community talk about alcohol, tobacco, and vape harms, we’re talking about a harm that we as a society generally ignore. But it’s also a harm that is preventable—if only our candidates had the political will to act.

Language isn’t just words. It shapes what we tolerate and what we accept as normal. Language has power—because it’s in our culture, it’s in our environment, and it’s in the very words we use. It’s time we stop letting billion-peso industries write the script.

If our duty bearers don’t prioritize health—if they don’t see the effect of this kind of culture and language on the voting public—then the onus is on us to elect leaders who will.

In an election year, the real question isn’t whether we’ll keep talking about it. It’s whether we can elect leaders who will finally do something about it. Whoever it is you decide to throw your support behind, remember to justify it based on record and not reputation. This year, let’s get genuine champions who prioritize public health over profit in office.

Dr. Maricar Limpin is a pulmonologist and past President of the Philippine College of Physicians.