How one flawed study enabled a shift to scorched-earth tobacco-like strategies, and dramatically changed the public health narrative on alcohol.

Dear Client:

The social and mainstream media arbiters of culture are absolutely vibrating with the revelation that Gen Z doesn’t drink as much beverage alcohol as previous generations. The actual data is fuzzy depending on the varying nature of research methodologies, so we naturally turn to the true experts in the field to get to the bottom of it: concert promoters. 

Concerts are great places to measure differences in generational behavior because, unlike even live sports, the audience self-segregates into their respective age groups depending on the headlining artist. And the people who run these shows definitively declare that despite images of Gen Z’s idol guzzling beer on the sidelines of football games, they drink much less than their partying elders in the Millennial, Gen X, and boomer generations do, (speculating that these wiley youngsters are pre-dosing with cannabinoid edibles instead). 

We would expect anti-alcohol crusaders to celebrate this considerable achievement, maybe take a victory lap or two, and declare a job well done. But this has not happened. In fact, something else entirely has been going on behind the scenes in what you might call the global Neo-Prohibitionist Industrial Complex (née the Anti-Tobacco Industrial Complex), and it should be of particular concern to those in the bev-alc and hospitality industries.

Ed. Note: We need to talk about the term “neo-prohibitionist”, made popular in the 1980s by August Busch III in defense of Spuds Mackenzie, among other things. The term has become controversial within the industry, at least in the U.S., as it was historically often thrown around with disparaging undertones, which today could inadvertently and needlessly offend public health groups and allied interests that the industry wants and needs to work with on a friendly and respectful basis to achieve reasonably balanced policy and regulatory goals — both at the state and federal levels. 

For our purposes here, neo-prohibitionists refer to the large global non-governmental organizations (NGOs) led by the World Health Organization (WHO), with strong Western European roots and values, working toward the ultimate goal of alcohol prohibition or as close as they can get, one cut at a time. 

A threadbare but still valid example of this distinction concerns Mothers Against Drunk Driving founder Candy Lightner, who famously left the organization as she felt MADD had “become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned … I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving”, indicating her preference to focus on the behavior, not the product.

Meanwhile, the industry focused on the behavior, leaning into more of a “social norms” approach to reduce underage drinking and drunk driving, which actually turned out to have worked like gangbusters, with an assist from the iPhone camera — nobody wants to be the Monday morning fool on Instagram  —  along with ride-sharing apps. Naw, Zoomers ain’t clowning. The concert venue concessionaires have the receipts to prove it. 

The point, and there is a point, is that not all public health advocates are neo-prohibitionists, but all neo-prohibitionists wear public health advocate clothing.

-HCS

This issue came top-of-mind to BBD in a brilliantly researched article last week by Felicity Carter in Wine Business Monthly, “How Neo-Prohibitionists Came to Shape Alcohol Policy”. In it, she describes these groups, which have been around for decades (the largest since 1851), as being organized, tightly coordinated, well-funded, and highly entrenched in positions of authority when it comes to recommending alcohol-related policies to governments, including tax policy.   

EMERGENCE OF WHO. It all started in 2015, when over 20 public health organizations dramatically resigned en masse from the EU’s Alcohol and Health Forum over claims that the alcohol industry held too much sway over proceedings. The Forum disbanded, leaving a three-year vacuum in European public health advocacy, writes Felicity. 

Enter the World Health Organization in 2018, the NGO’s NGO, to fill the void and deliver Brussels from demon alcohol. The WHO created the SAFER initiative — basically a set of public policy best practices for reducing harm related to alcohol. Importantly, it was launched “in collaboration with international partners.”

Here’s where it gets weird. One of the WHO’s most significant partners, then and now, is the Independent Order of Good Templars. If it sounds like a Medieval holdover from the days of the Illuminati, that’s because it is. It was founded in 1852 in upstate New York by Quakers and Freemasons as a vassal to encourage sober productivity in their laborers. It later moved to Stockholm and, likely growing weary of being mistakenly associated with the Harry Potter and/or Indiana Jones franchises, changed its name to Movendi International in 2020.

This Movendi is a huge organization with significant resources and a laser focus on what it repeatedly calls the harms caused by Big Alcohol, but really meaning all alcohol.

Movendi bases its ideology on a well-worn trope: Drink is the curse of the working class; (all the while unironically accepting funds from the lotto, where the working stiff— instead of getting a pint or bite to eat for their fiver — gets nothing.)

“Movendi’s worldview is simple: There are no artisans, small producers, or vignerons connected to land and history. There is only ‘Big Alcohol,’ which uses propaganda words like ‘moderation’ and ‘craft’ to conceal its true nature. And Big Alcohol is an ally of Big Tobacco—Movendi links alcohol to tobacco whenever it can.”

-Felicity Carter

A growing fear in the industry is that instead of executing a strategy to reduce the harm from alcohol, the focus of the WHO and their underlying NGOs like Movendi have shifted to reducing alcohol consumption for everyone. You know, like tobacco. 

THE TOBACCO CONNECTION. In researching this piece, I couldn’t help but marvel at the overlap in strategies, organizations, and people in the anti-drinking and anti-smoking movements. In fact, one doesn’t have to be conspiratorially minded to draw a straight line from zero-tolerance smoking policies to the new strategy of reducing alcohol consumption for all.

Anti-smoking and anti-drinking activists have a long history of collaboration, and certainly vigorously cite each other in a quilted pantheon of circular research, with the WHO in the center as the symphonic conductor. 

The anti-booze folks were no doubt jealous of their anti-smoking colleagues because the latter enjoyed ample research at their disposal showing that any amount of smoking is demonstrably harmful to health in a variety of ways, including cancer; while on the other hand, there were equally compelling studies showing that moderate drinking may actually provide some health benefits that correlate with longevity. 

Having headlines constantly trumpeting the health benefits of moderate drinking is hardly a springboard from which to launch a bona fide if-it-bleeds-it-leads public health crisis. What is an aspiring templar to do when you’ve got archives of iconic 60 Minutes episodes out there crowing about the marvels of the French Paradox? No health crisis means no funding, no power, no free lunches at the exquisite U.N. cafeteria, etc. Temperance was a cause in search of a crisis. A Knight Templar without a crusade, if you will.

Enter the Alcohol Use and Burden study published in The Lancet. 

THE LANCET. Published in the summer of 2018 in “The Lancet”, a medical journal, “Alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016”, concludes that the only safe level of alcohol consumption is none at all.

The study then slept quietly on a Lancet server somewhere for about three years. In fact, when I searched for the phrase “no safe level” in my email inbox, I didn’t receive the first hit until 2021, (with a constant stream of 54 emails thereafter).

That first “no safe level” email came in December 2021 from an alarmed European wine trade group that reported the European Parliament had just approved a report from its Special Committee on Beating Cancer, stating there is “no safe level” of alcohol consumption and citing the Lancet report which purports to correlate alcohol consumption with a risk of cancer. Bingo. From there it was off to the races.

Everybody is terrified of cancer. This was the break the neo-probes needed to launch a headline-grabbing tobacco-like public health crisis, and launch it they did.  

On January 4, 2023, the WHO published a press release: “No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health”. The gauntlet had been thrown, despite the fact that the Lancet Alcohol Use and Burden study that it’s based on has so many flaws that it’s impractical to go over them all in this already long-winded article (a few of which I’ve chronicled here if interested).  

“To identify a ‘safe’ level of alcohol consumption,” writes the WHO, “valid scientific evidence would need to demonstrate that at and below a certain level, there is no risk of illness or injury associated with alcohol consumption… Currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol ‘switch on’ and start to manifest in the human body.”

In other words, if you can’t prove that any amount of alcohol doesn’t cause cancer, we’re just going to assume it does — at any level of consumption, no matter how moderate. 

The problem, (in addition to the innate difficulty in proving a negative), reports Felicity Carter in a previous article also in Wine Business Monthly, is that in order to conduct a much-needed proper randomized control study of how moderate alcohol consumption correlates with health outcomes, including cancer, you’d need at least $100 million; and the only special interest rich enough to fund a study at that level is — you guessed it — Big Alcohol. And the Templars simply won’t sit at King Arthur’s Round Table with Big Al. Therefore, Felicity concludes such a study is unlikely to happen. Which is a shame, regardless of the study’s findings.

OH CANADA. Meanwhile, Movendi was active in convincing Canada’s Centre for Substance Use and Abuse to reduce its standard weekly guidelines from 15 drinks per week for men and 10 for women, to 2 standard drinks per week for everybody. 

The USDA’s/HHS guidelines for alcohol consumption come up for review in 2025. Last August, the director of the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism expressed mild support for Canada’s new guidelines, which sent the Bubbas flying off their rockers, hollering something fierce at the notion of being told by the government they can drink no more than two non-Bud Lights a week. He quickly walked it back. 

You may be asking yourself: Who cares? The American people don’t put much faith into the dietary guidelines ever since we learned we were gaslighted for decades by the USDA over the 1992 Food Pyramid, which overemphasized the importance of daily carbs one should consume, especially from American-grown corn, sparking an obesity epidemic that is rapidly emerging as the biggest and most expensive health care crisis in a generation.

The problem is the Dietary Guidelines are influential in guiding other policy and regulatory decisions. (Ed. Note: For this go-around, the guidelines will be led by the Dept. of Health and Human Services, with the USDA riding shotgun). One of the things I’ve learned is that when it comes to policy changes regarding public health, there has to be a long and credible paper trail gilded with important-sounding citations — and not many sources have greater gravitas than the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture and the HHS. The minute the phrase “no safe level” ends up in the Dietary Guidelines, every temperance-adjacent group from here to Timbuktu will be linking to it in the footnotes of endless reports and memoranda underpinning their own pet anti-alcohol agendas.

U.S. EXCEPTIONALISM. Regardless, the U.S. typically doesn’t pay much heed to international custom when it comes to alcohol policy anyway, as the 21st Amendment leaves most of those decisions to the states. Since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the states have set up either tightly structured state-controlled systems; or alternatively a highly regulated licensed three-tier system with baked-in checks and balances between and among the tiers. It’s a chaotic system, but in that manure of mayhem a durable yet flexible structure has emerged that somehow works pretty well in striking a balance between public health and consumer freedom without any interference from the Illuminati.

Our policy changes typically come in drastic waves, followed by decades of inactivity — (see the 1991 excise tax increase; the 2020 excise tax relief; the Costco case; the Four Loko take-down; the Granholm decision, etc.) — and they usually involve specific actions in the courts or the states rather than a change in national policy. We’re just built different.

The bottom line — and this is probably the most important takeaway — is that the “no safe level” messaging is simple and catchy enough to counter even the seductive animal charisma of Morley Safer talking up the cool Mediterranean lifestyle on 60 Minutes that wine people have been hanging their hat on for 30 years.

Plus, any debate on public health with the word “cancer” in it — an emotionally triggering word for most of the population — automatically tilts the public opinion paradigm in favor of the entity uttering the connection, however tenuous.

Shifting the focus from the problem to the product has historically not worked very well in reducing harm—at least not so far in the 10,000 years of intentional human alcohol consumption. 

But that hasn’t stopped the Templars from chasing after this empty chalice in what is certain not to be its last crusade.

Until tomorrow,

Harry, Jenn, Jordan, and Bianca

“For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.”

― Gore Vidal

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