How to Lose the Alcohol Culture War

Appeasement never works

Last week, the Australian wine industry lost its collective mind.

A regional body published a photo of leadership graduates wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “Drink more, die younger”.

About half a dozen Australian wine professionals sent me the news, thinking I would be appalled.

I was, but not by the T-shirts, but by a sector that panics at jokes while ignoring the real threat.

T-shirt troubles

Apparently, what happened was this: Coonawarra Vignerons posted a Facebook picture of people wearing the T-shirts, got some negative comments, and took down the post. That should have been the end of it.

Unfortunately, it must have been a slow news day in South Australia, because a local office of the ABC, Australia’s national broadcaster, decided to do a story.

Coonawarra Vignerons issued more than 150 words about how deeply ashamed they were. The T-shirt, said the statement, was “irresponsible messaging” that “does not reflect the values or professionalism” of members. Not only that, but the “individuals concerned” had “conveyed their sincere remorse”.

The ABC also got someone from a harm reduction organisation to weigh in, who called the T-shirts “terribly disappointing”, as if they represented a meaningful public health threat.

Industry body Wine Australia then issued a statement of its own, reiterating that it was important to discuss alcohol responsibly at all times. They also wrote: “The individuals in the photo did not intentionally seek to cause offence. Nevertheless, we are disappointed.”

In effect, they denounced the behaviour of young leaders graduating from a leadership programme in which Wine Australia was a named partner.

The CEO of Australian Grape & Wine then came out and said the incident was “an important opportunity for reflection”.

It sure is. You have to wonder why senior executives are wasting time issuing press releases about a T-shirt when significant parts of the Australian wine sector are collapsing in front of them.

And while they were busy scapegoating their future leaders, Australian academics were quietly publishing blueprints for prohibition.

The endgame

Last week, 10 public health academics from Griffith and Deakin Universities published a modelling study that looked at the cost of alcohol harms in Australia. Such modelling exercises are common.

But in this case, the academics modelled how much Australia would save in healthcare costs if it eliminated alcohol consumption altogether — and then recommended the government work towards exactly that.

“If we act now and eliminate alcohol consumption to zero, we could save the healthcare system $55 billion in the first 25 years,” wrote the lead author.

This from a country whose crackdown on tobacco has led where prohibition always goes — to the rise of organised crime. Since 2023, Australia has suffered gangland wars, murders, and more than 200 fire bombings. The situation with illicit tobacco is so out of control that tax officials just announced they are turning to sewage to figure out just how much is circulating.

Apparently what the public health lobby has learned from this deadly disaster is that the one thing Australia needs more of is prohibition.

Increasingly extreme

I have been immersed in public health material for two years now, and what is striking is how radical the alcohol control literature has become. Twenty-five years ago, academics working in the field acknowledged that the drinks trade was a legitimate business whose products brought pleasure to people, as well as harm.

Yet they had much more reason to be hardline, because not only did people drink a lot more, but alcohol companies regularly behaved like cartoon villains. One academic gave a talk on how Benedictine was sold in Malaysia as a postpartum medicine. Another revealed that a major company used Confederate images to market whiskey in Zimbabwe, at the height of the 1990s racial tensions.

It was a long way from a sector self-flagellating over a T-shirt slogan.

But now, at a time when consumption is falling, the literature focuses on how to denormalise alcohol and drive it out of the public space, and thereby out of our lives. Last year the Lancet said it was “crucial to dissociate alcohol from cultural traditions”. To get the ball rolling, they recommended that alcohol should no longer be served at medical or scientific events.

Alcohol Change UK, the charity behind Dry January, has been pushing for several years to make the workplace alcohol free, and they are now amplifying that idea in the UK media.

The rising power of the temperance industry won’t be halted by the drinks trade embracing its logic — and certainly not by trying to appease it over a perfectly benign joke. (Especially one that is factually correct. Drink too much and you will die younger.)

Wine (and gin & tonic) are among life’s great pleasures. Once you accept the framing of alcohol as nothing more than a toxin, and you agree that jokes are a form of harm that require grovelling apologies, the argument is lost.

Wine will soon be apologising for the product itself.

The next set of T-shirts might as well say “Closed”.