Summer 2005

EDITOR'S OUTBASKET

The continuing campaign to push alcohol as wonder drug

'What comes outta these bottles ain't no health tonic."
– Mary Boland to Zachary Scott in Guilty Bystander (1950)

CHICAGO, 1997, was where I and many colleagues were summoned to battle. At an international conference, Alcohol Policy XI, several researchers, community activists, prevention and treatment professionals and other interested parties from around the world heard the following warning: That over the coming five years, the most formidable challenge faced by those of us who work to prevent and treat alcohol problems would be the concerted campaign to stress the health benefits of moderate drinking.

It struck us as a quaint notion, if faintly alarmist. After all, there was a drastic uptick in binge-drinking to worry about. There were Ecstasy and Liquid X and Special K in the clubs and at the raves. There was the scourge of methamphetamines spreading eastward like wildfire from the Rockies and the Prairies, via Interstate truck routes, into big-city subcultures and hardscrabble rural counties. These were the looming problems - not whether a drink or two might or might not brighten the blood and soothe the heart. So, few of us paid any great heed.

But the Cassandras, as usual, had it right. The alcohol-is-good-for-you movement still chugs lustily along - and it's been eight years now, and counting. With enviable efficiency, the reports and studies and press releases keep rolling off the assembly line. And with dull predictability the newspapers and the morning shows and the on-line news services pick them up for a public eager to believe that indulgence can be good for them.

Just a few from just this year: "Moderate drinking may stem brain decline;" "Low alcohol consumption prevents stroke;" "Wine is heart healthy for women." Wine and beer and even a lean, mean martini have been touted as specifics against everything from gall bladder trouble to Alzheimer's Disease. You might think that a $3 Mountain Red in a screw-cap bottle was remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to.

SHOULDN'T THE SHEER PROFUSION of these "breakthrough" studies raise even a hint of skepticism? First of all, who's paying for them? Medical research costs money. Proposals must be made, protocols established, blind tests conducted, results peer-reviewed, findings published.

But when it comes to validating these exuberant claims about alcohol, our investigative reporters have been oddly uninquisitive (and their editors and producers uncustomarily gullible). What happened to the old question, Cui bono? - Whom does it benefit? The brewers, vintners and distillers would argue that these findings benefit everybody who chooses to tipple. I suggest their chief beneficiary is the alcohol industry itself.

• For instance, early this year Bloomberg News ran a story out of Stockholm claiming that alcohol kills and disables as many people as either tobacco or high blood pressure.
  
  
• Or, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 10 percent of pregnant women drink, two percent heavily, exposing their developing babies to the risk of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder - the leading (and entirely preventable) cause of mental retardation in the United States.
  
  
• Also addressing the almost 100 guests at the breakfast were outgoing Commissioner, Erie County Department of Mental Health Michael Weiner (now Commissioner of the Erie County Department of Social Services) and his successor at ECDMH, Philip R. Endress.

BUT MAYBE THE TRUTH will finally out. In April, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta analyzed data culled from a quarter of a million Americans during a 2003 study. They found that their own previous methodology had been flawed. Non-drinkers in the study, for example, were found to be at risk from other factors, such as being overweight and inactive, having hypertension or diabetes. The "moderate" drinkers, on the other hand, tended to be in better health, better educated, more active and more affluent than the tee-totaling control group. In short, the CDC was unable to conclude that moderate drinking was a factor in lowering risk of cardiovascular disease.

Ought we not to have known this empirically? Imbibing alcohol "for medicinal purposes" has been a black joke in our culture since long before Prohibition, as the flimsiest of excuses for a drinking problem. But with the stream of rosy news stories that, through a mixture of selective science and shrewd manipulation, seem to confuse happy hour with a brisk workout, we seem to have forgotten the punch line.