The Public Health Lobby Is Coming For Alcohol. This Gambit Won’t Help

Some in the wine industry embrace a failed tactic

Just as they’d finished celebrating New Year, alcohol professionals got hit with the worst possible news. Dr Vivek Murthy, America’s Surgeon General, declared alcohol a carcinogen and called for cancer warning labels on alcohol.

There were lots of possible responses, from doing a deep dive into the science to considering the legal and marketing implications.

Plenty of people did any or all of these things.

Some wine professionals, on the other hand, did something different.

The “do it to Julia!” gambit

Suzanna Hamilton and John Hurt as Julia and Winston in the 1984 film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Did you read Orwell’s “1984” in high school? Towards the end, Winston gets a cage full of rats strapped to his head. He’s told that as soon as the rats are released, they’ll eat his face. Winston screams “Do it to Julia!”

The moment he betrays her, he gets his reprieve.

Which is the tactic some wine professionals embraced. They launched social media and blog posts about how outrageous it was for the Surgeon General to attack wine, instead of sugary beverages, or junk food, or food dyes, or additives, or whatever it was the writer felt most strongly about. Why didn’t Dr Murthy go after them?

Unfortunately, the “stop scrutinising me, because that guy over there is worse” approach has never worked outside fiction. It’s never worked with teachers, it’s never worked with police, and it’s never worked on your mother.

I also think it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding. Wine people don’t think of themselves as working with alcohol, so can’t understand the public health attacks. Alcohol is what’s in vodka! Wine is the beverage of moderation!

Wine people are the good guys!

This isn’t the way the alcohol control lobby sees it. To them, ethanol is ethanol, whether it comes in the form of wine, beer or spirits.

There is no special pleading for wine that’s going to work. Not culture, not history, and not the shared table. And nor will drawing attention to the health problems caused by junk food.

But why didn’t he attack them?

Good news for everybody who thinks junk food needs regulatory scrutiny — the public health lobby is coming for them, too.

About 10 years ago, for various reasons — mostly because legislation had gone as far as it could — some of the money available for tobacco control work dried up. This left a few tobacco control people in need of a job.

Some joined NGOs focusing on other areas like alcohol and lifestyle diseases, bringing their model of tobacco control with them.

This is one of the reasons that the noise around alcohol and health has become so loud recently, by the way.

Numerous universities and research units that used to specialise in tobacco have also widened their remit to include alcohol, or alcohol and junk food, or alcohol, junk food, and whatever else will bring the grant money rolling in. The latest to do so was Tobacconomics at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, which in November 2024 became Economics for Health. It will now look beyond tobacco to alcohol, food, the environment and opioids.

The tobacco control approach has even informed a new model of public health. Called the Commercial Determinants of Health (CDoH), it sees the profit motive as the primary driver of lifestyle-related conditions like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

So wedded to this idea is the WHO, that in 2021 it created an Economic and Commercial Determinants of Health (CED) unit. Its first major report took aim at everything from infant formula to surgical robots. It even criticised GlaxoSmithKline’s campaign to get middle-aged people vaccinated against shingles (the advertising worked on me!). They argued that because the campaign was commercially motivated, it was therefore suspect.

But one organisation can only do so much, so the WHO has put the project of reforming global capitalism aside in favour of focusing on four specific Health Harming Industries (HHIs): tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods, and fossil fuels.

So far, academics and lobbyists have struggled to create a response to the health dangers associated with fossil fuels, because the tobacco model falls over in the face of an industry dominated by state actors like OPEC; plus, Russia is an important partner of the WHO, so it’s not in the WHO’s interest to attack Gazprom.

Fortunately, alcohol and junk food offer enough opportunities to keep everyone busy for years to come.

My point is, that nobody should worry about a lack of action on junk food. It’s already happening, with lots of cherry-picking and claims that are running ahead of the science, all being amplified by wellness grifters who are polluting the discussions. I’m pretty sure we’re heading for a world where everything from chocolate to bacon will be covered in warning labels. All for our own good.

Here’s what happened in Europe

In any case, the Surgeon General (current or future) is unlikely to issue a food Advisory. Food is just too complicated — no warning could ever take all the nuances into account.

This is what politicians in the European Parliament discovered for themselves when they agreed to mandatory food labelling. They had planned to slap a Nutri-Score style label on all food products, so consumers could see how healthy or unhealthy the food was.

Great idea!

Until people took a closer look at what implementation would actually mean.

The Italians had a freak out once they realised that it wasn’t just frozen dinners under fire. Prized artisanal products like olive oil, Parma ham and Parmigiano cheese would also bear the scarlet letters, because they’re high in fat. The labelling proposal has since been quietly buried.

But another proposal will come round again. While I think a food Advisory is unlikely, there are plenty of other measures that are possible, and there are lobbyists working overtime to implement them. I fully expect a day will come when I walk into a French patisserie to find it festooned with warnings about diabetes.

Because there’s always someone out there pushing for more and more drastic action.

So when it comes to the question of cancer warning labels on alcohol, don’t feed the trolls. The attempts to distract are likely to be seized on and used as evidence of alcohol industry interference.

This is a moment for science and reason, and for thoughtful discussions of evidence and its consequences — not for counterproductive attempts to put the spotlight on someone else.

Or, as one of my friends says, “A finger pointed at another is four pointed back at you.”

The below are real suggestions, not AI:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/17/bacon-cigarette-health-warnings-labour-donor-dale-vince/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11002117/Scientists-want-gruesome-cigarette-style-picture-warning-labels-chocolate-off.htm