Opinion: New campaign on alcohol consumption guidelines is fear mongering

Written for Daily Hive by Mark Hicken, a consultant to the BC wine and liquor industry and a former lawyer.

As a passionate industry leader in the wine industry and (now retired) lawyer, I was deeply disappointed by the so-called “Low-Risk Alcohol Drinking Guidelines” that were suggested by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) earlier this year. As someone who works in the industry, I have always been an advocate of responsible alcohol consumption and supported the CCSA’s previous guidance because it reflected that. But advising that “no amount of alcohol is safe to consume” is so extreme that it risks undermining public trust and confidence in health policy.

There’s strength in numbers, as they say, and I soon found great strength in the fact that my feelings were widely shared by my colleagues at BC wineries and BC craft beer and distilleries, by many researchers and scientists, and by most members of the public. More than half of the respondents to a recent Ipsos poll agreed that the CCSA’s recommended number of drinks was so low that “it lacked credibility” and was nothing but “fear-mongering” tactics. Even Health Canada, the federal agency that commissioned the CCSA’s report in the first place, has not adopted or approved the report.

So you can imagine how shocked I was when BC Cancer and British Columbia’s Ministry of Health doubled down on the CCSA report with the launch of The Proof, a new online public awareness campaign prominently stating that “alcohol causes cancer” and displaying wine bottles with “cancer” emblazoned across their labels.

Screenshot from the new campaign, The Proof

Having shared a glass of wine with countless friends, family members, and fellow oenophiles, the idea that the industry was somehow spreading a disease among its cherished clientele was utterly repugnant. So, I did some research and found that much of The Proof is based on a remarkably narrow and biased selection of evidence.

For one thing, it turns out that the CCSA “cherry-picked” its research sources. It started out with almost 3,000 relevant studies but disqualified all but 16 of them, many of which were authored by the same small group of people. So, this research is hardly representative of “the science” in this area.   

For another, the CCSA ignored hundreds of studies and relevant research that show that moderate alcohol consumption is either fine or even beneficial. Parts of its own technical analysis outline various health benefits from drinking alcohol in moderation, particularly in respect of heart disease and stroke. But The Proof fails to mention any of this. Instead, it relies on biased and patronizing warnings that are dangerous because they are prime examples of what a Harvard Kennedy School of Government study refers to as “Wolf or Puppy” warnings. When people are flooded with too many “puppy” warnings, they tune out when a real wolf, like COVID-19, is present.

The Proof’s myopic focus on alcohol consumption is a prime example of confirmation bias. It considers only alcohol-related cancer risk while overlooking key variables such as diet, obesity, smoking, exercise, and family history. It seeks only alcohol-related risk, so that is all it finds.

No wonder both the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research (ISFAR), an international group of invited physicians and scientists who are specialists in their fields and committed to balanced and well-researched analysis regarding alcohol and health, and the technical advisory committee to Quebec’s Éduc’alcool public awareness campaign have given the CCSA report a failing grade due to poor science. “I am appalled by the conclusions of the authors,” writes Dr. R. Curtis Ellison, a Boston University medical professor and chair of ISFAR, in a scathing critique of the CCSA findings. “They present a pseudo-scientific amalgamation of selected studies of low scientific validity that fit their preconceived notions and ignore many high-quality studies whose results may not support their own views.”

From my perspective as a leader in the wine industry, The Proof’s most egregious sin is that it fails to consider the well-documented psychological and social benefits of moderate alcohol consumption on the lives of Canadians, benefits many Canadians see every day of their life. As Brock University medical historian Dan Malleck puts it in a recent op-ed of his own, “For many people, alcohol is a way to celebrate or commiserate, to rejoice or mourn, to relax or blow off steam. There is robust research on the benefits of such social connectedness to health.”

I support the view that “life’s too short to drink bad wine.” But it is much too short to be bullied into forgoing a lifetime of multi-sensory enjoyment, and proven health and social benefits, by the divisive, biased, and potentially dangerous fiction being promoted by The Proof.