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Urban Outfitters Corporate Prescription to Harm Youth

RxBeer 
Urban Outfitters is known for selling controversial merchandise. But its latest product line has ventured into a new realm: a series of medical-themed drinking products that includes prescription shot glasses, pint glasses, and syringe shot-shooters. A sleeve designed to hold a can of beer resembles a prescription medicine bottle, with the following content listed on the Rx label:

Drug name: Beer.

Quantity: As much as you can stomach.

Instructions: Take one can by mouth. Repeat until intoxicated.

Refills: Sure!

Shot glasses with a big Rx logo on the front repeat these same instructions.

Many individuals and groups are upset about a teen-focused company selling products with prescription drug imagery, and rightfully so. But there is an important, and glaring, additional danger with Urban Outfitters' new line that must be called to the forefront as well. These products are not only promoting, normalizing, and downright giggling about youth using prescription drugs. By using shot and pint glasses and other alcohol products labeled with prescription language, they are promoting alcohol as the self-prescribed drug of choice.

Urban Outfitters claims that its target customer is between the ages of 18 and 30 - a demographic that contains both underage youth, for whom the supposed "directions" for using the alcohol paraphernalia are illegal, and young people who by definition are at higher risk for drinking, drinking more, and experiencing alcohol-related harm. These products promote drinking as not only cool and normal behavior for youth, but also a legitimate anecdote to one’s problems. The prescription beer can sleeve labeled “Liquid Happiness 12oz” tells youth directly that alcohol should be consumed in order to feel good.

Guess we shouldn't be too surprised by this latest atrocity, when another Urban Outfitters product is a flask that screams F- MY LIVER.