Something is rotten in the state of drink.
In 2023, Americans consumed less beer than they had in a generation. Wine sales shrank for the third consecutive year. Spirits sales were flat.
Prominent observers of the alcohol industry are crying foul. "The U.S. government's coming attack on wine," a public relations consultant wrote earlier this year of updated dietary guidelines that could reduce recommended thresholds of healthy drinking. "The worst thing I have seen in 25 years," a long-time wine industry writer said in late 2023 of the World Health Organization (WHO) report that low levels of alcohol increase the risk of cancer and that "no safe amount of alcohol consumption for cancers and health can be established."
Some alcohol industry insiders see a conspiracy between what they describe as dubious science and advocates with undue influence, including Amanda Berger, PhD, a vice president of the trade group the U.S. Distilled Spirits Council. "There are efforts underway, both at the global level and in the [United States], to develop alcohol policies driven by anti-alcohol activist agendas," she wrote in an email to Think Global Health. "We have returned to the neo-prohibition era," warned Silicon Valley Bank in its 2020 report.
Considering that each year excess drinking kills, by various estimates, 1.8 million to 3 million people worldwide (178,000 in the United States alone), the clamor for safeguards isn't exactly surprising—nor that people who profit from selling alcohol would object.
Yet when it comes to shaping alcohol policies in the United States and abroad, it's the industry that wields true political power. Framing the current turbulence as a "war on alcohol" could cloud the picture and delay a reckoning with reality.
War on alcohol: Fact or fiction?
The alcohol industry would not be the first industrial group, on encountering regulatory headwinds, to depict itself as unfairly maligned. The past decade has featured the war on cops, the war on beef, the war on business, and who could forget the war on Christmas.
Kristin Goss, a professor of political science at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, has studied numerous social movements. She said you can measure their vitality by the number and resources of advocates, the media coverage they generate, and their influence on the legislative and regulatory machinery of government. Under these criteria, she is skeptical that a meaningful, present-day campaign against alcohol is under way.
"If there was a war on wine in particular, the middle-aged women in America would have noticed," she joked.
When it comes to lobbying and legislating about alcohol policies in the United States, alcohol businesses appear to hold nearly undisputed sway. In Congress in 2023, the industry had 303 federal lobbyists and reported nearly $30 million in spending, according to Open Secrets. The most notable organization working on even a narrow piece of alcohol's harms, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, reports spending barely 1% that amount.
That's far fewer lobbyists than Big Pharma's phalanx of 1,854, but exceeds the 261 registered for Big Tobacco. Arguably, the most significant action Congress has taken toward alcohol in the last decade has been to reduce federal alcohol taxes, which happened in late 2020 with bipartisan support.
The picture doesn't differ much in state legislatures, which have allowed alcohol taxes to fall by more than 30% since 1990. In an interview, Adam Hoffer, director of excise tax policy at the Tax Foundation, notes that recently lawmakers in a few states have attempted to reverse that trend—notably in New Mexico and Oregon—but the alcohol industry has readily squelched those efforts.
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