Making the Case for (Moderate) Alcohol Consumption
The Alcoholic Beverage Industry Needs to Get Out of Its Defensive Crouch
People indulge in all sort of vices. They masturbate to porn, gorge on Twinkies, smoke cigarettes, snort lines of coke. The human taste for alcohol might seem to be simply one more vice to add to the list, and therefore something that healthy-minded people should ideally eliminate from their lives.
To be sure, from a purely medical perspective alcohol is clearly not good for you. Recent meta-studies suggesting that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption have led global health organizations to recommend that individuals severely reduce their alcohol consumption or—better yet— eliminate it altogether.
Global health officials’ playbook with regard to alcohol is pretty clear. Their plan is to dust off the strategy that worked so well with tobacco and simply apply it to the next vice on its list. Tax and regulate alcohol heavily, shift public opinion, and gradually transform the act of drinking into an almost unimaginable sin. The Canadian government’s recent recommendation that people limit their alcohol consumption to two drinks per week—down from 15 for men and 10 for women—is the latest step toward a revival of Prohibitionism. Learning from its previous mistakes, neo-Prohibition replaces outright bans with a combination of health recommendations, warning labels, punishing taxes, stifling regulations, and social shaming to attain, through indirect means, an outcome that would have gladdened the hearts of 19th century temperance advocates.
I recently traveled with my 16 year-old daughter on an older model airplane, one that still had ashtrays in the arm rests. She idly played with one for a bit and then asked what it was for, maybe used gum? When I explained it was an ash tray—that when I was her age people openly smoked on airplanes—her eyes grew wide with disbelief. It was as if I had told her that back in the seventies we used to pass around venomous snakes during take-off. Health officials are planning to create a world when my daughter’s child will be similarly amazed that anyone was ever allowed to drink alcohol on a flight.
The response of the global alcoholic beverage industry to this drive to legislate it out of existence has been surprisingly pallid. In allowing itself to get painted into the same corner of shame as porn, junk food and nicotine, the alcohol industry has effectively already ceded the battle. The only options left at that point are to lie low and hope that regulators don’t notice you or curl up into a ball and wait for the legislative hammer to fall.
This passivity and resignation are, however, completely unwarranted, and based upon at least two fundamental misunderstandings.
The first is has to do with how we assess and respond to risk. Drinking alcohol raises our risk of mortality, but so do many other activities—driving a motor vehicle, participating in certain sports, traveling abroad—that we nonetheless engage in because they are useful, pleasurable or both. The best way to ensure a maximally long life would be to never leave the house except for medically-advised doses of exercise and sunlight and supervised social interaction, but no one wants that. Risk mitigation is only one factor that we consider in deciding how to live our lives. Commenting on the 2018 Lancet article that concluded that there was no safe level of alcohol consumption, Sir David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, wryly observed: “Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention. There is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.” Similar arguments have been made by reasonable voices pushing back against Health Canada’s latest guidelines.
An even deeper misunderstanding, however, has to do with the very nature of human beings’ relationship to alcohol, as well as the role that it has played in the very creation of civilization. As I explain in detail in Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, our taste for alcohol is fundamentally different from our craving for junk food or pornography. While the latter are evolutionary mistakes—brain hijacks or ancient adaptations gone wrong—our desire for alcohol has had important adaptive functions over the history of our species. Alcohol is not merely a vice to be eliminated or grudgingly tolerated. It is an essential tool in reducing stress, enhancing individual and group creativity, and facilitating social bonding. To have survived this long, and remained so central to human social life, alcohol’s individual-level advantages, combined with group-level social benefits, must have — over the course of human history — outweighed its more obvious costs.
Debates about the proper role of alcohol in our lives need to be informed by our best current scientific, anthropological, and historical scholarship. This is currently very far from the reality. Getting the right perspective will put us in a place to more clearly see what concrete trade-offs we face when we formulate policies and make personal decisions about the role of alcoholic beverages in our lives. No informed decision, at either the individual or social level, can be made without a better appreciation of role that alcohol has played in creating, enhancing, and sustaining human sociality, and indeed civilization itself.
This is why industries that produce or serve alcohol both can and should get out of their defensive crouches. The proper response to global health authorities’ campaign to bring about de facto prohibition is to reject their basic framing of the situation. Alcoholic beverages and service industries need to make explicit and clear the fundamental and crucial difference between our taste for alcohol and our indulgence in other vices. They need to both understand and be able to explain the positive case for (moderate) alcohol consumption.
This is the only way that alcohol will escape the fate of tobacco, which I sincerely hope it does. I would like my daughter to live in a world where, once she is an adult, a glass of wine to relax on a long flight is still a welcome and legal option. She can leave the poisonous snakes at home.
Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.
