Hiding the Alcoholocaust: Big Alcohol Uses Tobacco Playbook to Rewrite Science, Block Reforms and Conceal the Reality that Alcohol is 1 of the World’s Leading Drivers of Preventable Disease and Death

Urgent action is needed to protect public health from alcohol industry influence and to curb alcohol-related disease and death, according to international researchers.

“The alcohol industry has a serious, and dangerous, conflict of interest between its health-related education and policy-influencing activities, and its commercial priorities,” they say.

That warning comes in one of a series of reports published this year in Future Healthcare, The Lancet Public Health, Addiction and other journals, all pointing to the same conclusion: Alcohol is one of the world’s leading drivers of preventable disease, yet industry tactics routinely delay or weaken health protections to maximize sales and profits.

The numbers are stark. Alcohol consumption accounted for 2.6 million deaths worldwide in 2019. It was recently shown to increase the risk of developing at least seven types of cancer: mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, liver, colorectal and female breast.

The toll also extends far beyond individual drinkers. Like tobacco, the alcohol industry also fuels broad population-level secondhand harms, including injuries and deaths.

Those impacts have been substantially underestimated until now due to a lack of data and modern analysis techniques, researchers say this month in The Lancet Public Health. [MORE]