In May 2024, the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance (USAPA) hosted their annual conference, Alcohol Policy 20, in Arlington, Virginia, gathering hundreds of state and local organizers, researchers, community activists, and public officials working on alcohol policy. One workshop was titled: “What’s Our Movement’s Name?” In a studio room of the Renaissance, attendees hashed out ideas. Tiffany Hall, the chair of USAPA, co-facilitated the session, writing the suggestions on the whiteboard: Big Alcohol Accountability; Communities Above the Influence; Rethink the Drink; and Bar None. They didn’t land on a consensus. “It just brought up a lot of conversation,” she says.
For those in the alcohol industry, however, one name has stuck—neo-prohibitionists, conjuring a second coming of the original temperance movement. Groups working to put limitations on access to alcohol have existed for almost as long as this country. The failed national experiment that was Prohibition largely removed public sympathy for this cause—that is, until recently. Organizations like USAPA, Alcohol Justice, and Movendi International have grown in size and influence and gained greater access to government policymakers—and their work is often at loggerheads with the alcohol industry.
But there is one fact that both the alcohol control advocates (as this article will refer to them) and the alcohol industry agree upon: it is a movement, and it’s gaining momentum.
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“It’s clearly not a prohibitionist movement in the traditional sense; there’s no call to prohibit the consumption or sale of alcohol,” says Tom Wark, a wine public relations professional and the executive director of the National Association of Wine Retailers (NAWR). “I call it the anti-alcohol movement.”
In January 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a statement that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe” for human health, which came after input from organizations including Movendi and the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance, of which USAPA is a member. This catapulted the conversation into the public arena, and focused the conflict on whether any amount of alcohol consumption is risk-free. This debate will reach its apex in early 2025 with the release of the updated “Guidance on Alcoholic Beverages” in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, currently under review, which sources within the industry indicate might echo the WHO pronouncement. Even the procedural revision of these guidelines has been mired in controversy and accusations of bias.
“I’m worried about the impact it’ll have on the alcohol industry in general, particularly the wine industry,” says Wark. “And I’m worried about the false messaging that will be delivered to consumers overall.”
As the conflict escalates, SevenFifty Daily spoke to alcohol control advocates and beverage trade professionals to find out where this movement came from, what the endgame is, and whether there’s a future in which its goals can be compatible with an economically robust alcohol industry.
Where Did This Movement Come From?
While most alcohol control advocates don’t identify as prohibitionists, Movendi International is, in its own words, “the largest independent global social movement for development through alcohol prevention.” As Dave Parker, the CEO and owner of Benchmark Wine Group, points out, “alcohol prevention is an absolute statement.”
Founded in 1851 as the Independent Order of Good Templars—which was influential in implementing Prohibition, something the organization disputes as a failure—it rebranded in 2020 as Movendi International to reflect a more modern and broader social mission. That mission is growing in popularity: in the four years between 2018 and 2022, according to its progress report, 22 new organizations joined as members. In that time they also published over 1,000 stories, science digests, and blog posts to “expose the predatory practices of Big Alcohol.” (Movendi did not respond to multiple requests for an interview). It now has 166 member organizations working within 62 countries.
Their influence has grown, too. Movendi appears as a source for the first time in the WHO’s 2024 “Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health and Treatment of Substance Use Disorders,” but on its website it states that it has contributed “actively to WHO’s work” and “has been a partner for more than three decades.” The list of organizations Movendi partners and collaborates with is extensive, including multiple UN platforms and programs, signaling its reach across the globe, from the West African Alcohol Policy Alliance to the Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS) in London, which, incidentally, also has roots in the original temperance movement. California-based partner Alcohol Justice, which describes itself as “the industry watchdog,” has also grown; between 2015 and 2023, contributions to the organization increased by 52 percent to over $2 million.
The nonprofit, nonpartisan USAPA—another close ally of Movendi—was founded in 2014 as a coalition of state and local organizations working on alcohol policy, independent of commercial interests. It translates research into public health practice, assisting policymakers to know what changes will have the most impact. Hall is also the CEO of nonprofit Recover Alaska, which works to implement some of those policies in the state, and she, like many similar nonprofits, relies on the kind of data USAPA provides. While these organizations are often tiny—USAPA operates with a staff of six volunteers and filed $324,000 in revenue in 2022, while Movendi employs just seven people and has an annual budget of €300,000 ($314,259) according to its EU registration—fostering coalition building between state, national, and global groups and coordinating across fields of prevention, recovery, and policy advocacy has proven incredibly effective.
“There has been a sea change,” agrees Tim Stockwell, Ph.D, an emeritus professor of psychology and a scientist with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research in British Columbia, Canada. “If you go back 25 years, the mainstream consensus in my field was that there were health benefits from alcohol,” he says, benefits that his research has called into question. The New York Times referred to Dr. Stockwell as “one of the people most responsible for our cultural course correction on alcohol.” His research features in the WHO’s very first “Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health” back in 2002; he has worked for Movendi in several capacities; and his name appears in over 1,000 news articles on alcohol and health in the past year alone.
While many in the alcohol industry consider him a persona non grata, Stockwell, for his part, says he hasn’t “set about to try and persuade people,” and is “amazed” at the interest in his work. He attributes the paradigm shift in attitudes toward alcohol less to his research and more to “a general increase in health awareness in the population and among young adults.” He nods to the advent of social media which provided alternative means to communicate and connect aside from through drinking culture. “There’s a whole lot more options now,” he says.
There is no doubt that the sociocultural shift away from drinking alcohol among young adults and the arrival of the sober-curious movement has given traction to the research from Stockwell and other scientists in the field, amplifying the messaging of alcohol control groups. The WHO pronouncement in 2023 was a pivotal moment in this debate, swiftly followed by stricter Canadian drinking guidelines from the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (which, notably, were never formally adopted by Health Canada), and both were extensively covered by the global press. According to an August Gallup poll, 45 percent of Americans now say drinking one or two alcoholic beverages per day is bad for one’s health, representing a six-percentage-point increase since last year and a 17-point increase since the prior poll in 2018. As Wark says, “It’s a matter of [anti-alcohol groups] having been working toward this for a very, very long time and things coming to fruition.”
For Hall, the recent wins for the movement are a culmination of all these factors, but most notably the research. “The research is increasingly clear and people are slowly learning more and more that alcohol is a carcinogen … that helps people to feel okay drinking less and changing policy,” she says. “We have a leg to stand on more than we had in the past.”
“We’re not trying to take away anyone’s alcohol. We’re trying to help people understand better what the risks are so they can make informed decisions. And we’re trying to put some guardrails up where that is not enough.” — Tiffany Hall, U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance
The new research isn’t without its detractors. Laura Catena, a medical doctor and a member of centenarian wine family, who wrote an op-ed for SevenFifty Daily on this subject, is amongst other medical professionals and scientists arguing that the results don’t support the claim that no level of alcohol is safe. Even Stockwell somewhat tempers the most extreme language: “We can get this in perspective a little bit; at fairly low levels of consumption, a few drinks a week, it’s a tiny, tiny risk to health for most people.”
That isn’t the message getting across to the general public, however. “We’ve got bad science, and then we have a whole bunch of reporters jumping on that,” says Parker. This is partly because there is a national appetite to reckon with alcohol’s dangers, a zeitgeist which serves the interest of those trying to pursue legislative change around alcohol health policy.
What Are the Movement’s Stated Goals?
“We’re not trying to take away anyone’s alcohol,” says Hall. “We’re trying to help people understand better what the risks are so they can make informed decisions. And we’re trying to put some guardrails up where that is not enough.”
“Reducing the harms of alcohol” is the catchall goal. “There are a number of policies that have been proven again and again to reduce death, disease, and violence related to alcohol,” says Hall. “Those generally include the four Ps: policies on price, product, place, and promotion.”
Hall calls raising taxes on alcohol the “gold standard.” These were federally decreased and then given a permanent tax cut in 2020, something alcohol control groups strongly recommended against. For USAPA, priorities also include restricting the density of alcohol outlets; reducing the legal blood alcohol content for driving from 0.08 to 0.05; and undoing some of the COVID-era policy changes that allowed for the home delivery of alcohol.
“Changing the price, controlling the marketing and promotion, and controlling the availability,” summarizes Jem Roberts, the senior external affairs manager at IAS, which connects research on alcohol’s impact with public policy. “Abstinence is not the goal … loads of people that work in this world drink, and so it’d be quite mad if they wanted to totally rid the world of alcohol that they enjoy themselves.” While these alcohol control groups all pursue similar goals, Roberts adds, “Something that is lacking in the alcohol field in general is a sort of endgame vision.”
The SAFER initiative was launched in 2018 by WHO in partnership with many of these organizations and offers a roadmap for alcohol control advocates to follow. SAFER is an acronym for the five most cost-effective interventions to reduce alcohol-related harm, including: strengthening restrictions on alcohol availability; advancing drink-driving countermeasures; facilitating access to interventions and treatment; enforcing restrictions on alcohol promotion; and raising prices on alcohol.
“I think our appetite for alcohol as humans is pretty substantial and I don’t think that’s going to change soon,” says Stockwell. “I think there might be tinkering with pricing, advertising, and labeling, and people being a bit more cautious and living longer, and just being more aware of some of the risks.” That “tinkering,” however, if some groups had their way, would be substantial; this September, Movendi called for raising excise taxes on alcohol to 40 percent of the retail price, based on a Michael Bloomberg-backed Task Force on Fiscal Policy for Health report, which is deeply worrisome to those in the alcohol industry who are already contending with a down market.
Approaches to Harm Reduction
In the U.S., around 178,000 people die from excessive drinking each year according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a 29 percent increase from just a few years earlier (2016 to 2017), with a notable spike during the pandemic. This trend is mirrored in alcohol-related emergency department visits. Contributing factors are varied, from barriers to treatment for alcohol use disorders to the loosening of alcohol policies at a state level.
For its part, the alcohol industry launched the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility (now Responsibility.org) in 1991 with the mission to eliminate underage drinking and drunk and impaired driving and empower adults to make responsible choices around alcohol. According to its 2023 Impact Report, that year it reached nearly a million students and 17,000 educators with its programs, and strengthened 241 state and federal impaired driving laws, amongst other successes. Funded by Bacardi, Brown-Forman, Diageo, Pernod Ricard, and other global beverage companies, some see these efforts as paying lip service to social responsibility, yet with $9 million toward program services in 2023 alone there is no doubt its reach is extensive.
Alcohol control groups, however, take issue with the phrase “responsible drinking” as vague and focused on personal behavior, not health. “It establishes a binary—you’re either a responsible drinker or you’re not—when alcohol problems exist on a spectrum,” says Roberts. “It really stops people seeking help if they don’t see themselves as this alcoholic ‘other.’” Hall also doesn’t support the use of words like “moderation or responsible or safe” because it puts the onus on the individual drinker “rather than recognizing it’s a systemic issue.”
“If they can do for alcohol what was done for cigarettes, that’s a great success [for the neo-prohibitionist movement]. And in order to achieve that, they have to say that all amounts of alcohol are bad. But that’s simply not true.” — Dr. Laura Catena
But this lack of distinction between, let’s say, drinking within recommended guidelines and heavy or binge drinking can confuse the messaging on alcohol safety for the 75 percent of alcohol-drinking adults in the U.S. who don’t overconsume. “They don’t distinguish between abusive or immoderate consumption and responsible consumption, and that’s improper … and it’s intentional,” says Wark. “The correct response to alcohol harm is trying to teach people how to drink responsibly, and among the anti-alcohol contingent there’s zero interest in that.”
Dr. Catena fears that if guidelines take an extreme position, they can cause people to ignore them altogether. Even Stockwell thinks the wording of the WHO statement was “alarmist.” “They say ‘no safe level.’ I think it’d be more accurate and more realistic to say ‘no risk-free level.’ Saying ‘no safe level’ is implying that you can never have a drop, but it’s like most things we do that are enjoyable—I mean, for goodness sake, sugar, cheeseburgers, absolutely. We all do it. And so now it’s in the same league if you’re doing it at fairly low levels.”
Catena points to a potential endgame in this verbiage debate: “If they can say ‘no safe level,’ then it’s no longer a personal decision,” she says. “That’s why they’re not using the word ‘moderate.’” She adds, “If they can do for alcohol what was done for cigarettes, that’s a great success [for the neo-prohibitionist movement]. And in order to achieve that, they have to say that all amounts of alcohol are bad. But that’s simply not true.”
Catena isn’t the only one to point out that if the absolute health risk is legitimized—especially as it pertains to cancer—then alcohol control groups can follow the model of incremental prohibition that took down Big Tobacco. Movendi and USAPA make no secret of taking inspiration from that public health success story, even in their use of language, always referring to the alcohol industry as “Big Alcohol.” The final session of the Alcohol Policy 20 conference was titled “Alcohol and Cancer: A New Litigation Strategy Against Large Producers.”
Alcohol Industry Pushback
While consolidation in the alcohol industry has put a market share in the hands of a small number of multinational companies, for the thousands of small producers, multigenerational family businesses, or just passionate beverage professionals, being lumped together as Big Alcohol is a mischaracterization. And many in the industry have pushed back against this.
“When you look at the history of winemaking, it’s one of the defining factors where civilization and culture is concerned,” says Wark. “But when you excise the idea that there is a possibility of drinking in a moderate or responsible way, then all of that heritage is taken off the table because it doesn’t matter. Everything is placed in the box of whether or not it can harm you.”
Parker, through his role as the president of the board of directors of the NAWR, has used his data science background to put together a presentation of all the peer-reviewed research papers on alcohol and health to counter the claims that any amount of alcohol is dangerous. So far, he’s presented to Columbia Law School, Wine Industry Network, and at the Renaissance Weekend. “It’s going to need to be a multipronged strategy,” says Parker. “It’s going to take the industry coming together, as well as those brave people in the medical field and in the research fields to take this forward. Thousands of studies were done by professional scientists, and they ought to be coming back and defending their work.” Parker also met with the Congressional Wine Caucus and Society of Medical Friends of Wine where he discussed the “misinformation propagated by anti-alcohol lobbyists.”
Wine journalist Karen MacNeil and public relations professionals Gino Colangelo and Kimberly Noelle Charles launched Come Over October earlier this year to encourage people to invite family and friends to come together during the month of October and share some wine and friendship. The goal is to demonstrate that wine has a positive social impact, too.
Representative Mike Thompson, a Democrat of California, points to the economic impact on a winemaking district like his. “The wine industry is an important community in my district and across the country,” he says. “It creates a lot of jobs, pays a lot of taxes, pays good wages, pays healthcare, and keeps a lot of the countryside in agriculture as opposed to other things that would be environmentally a problem.” (Though alcohol control groups counter the economic impact argument by pointing to the cost of alcohol harm to the taxpayer.) Representative Thompson adds, “They could be destructive and harmful to a pretty incredible industry. One that self monitors the use of their product.”
A Mutual Distrust
Accusations of bias exist on both sides of the debate. Parker refers to the alcohol control lobby as a “small, special interest group pushing incorrect information,” which are, in Parker’s opinion, “masquerading as public health entities when in fact they have exactly one motive, which is to stop all forms of consumption of alcohol.” Stockwell has fielded accusations of being in the pocket of Movendi. In an interview on Felicity Carter’s Drinks Insider podcast, he responded to this charge, saying, “I don’t know where this idea that Movendi, having anything to do with them, is a conflict of interest. They don’t pay my salary.”
For alcohol industry members, however, whose livelihood depends on its continued growth, the conflict of interest is hard to deny. “[The alcohol industry’s] aims are on the whole mutually exclusive from public health aims,” says Roberts. “That’s not to say they need to be, but the way that they lobby and they practice are. … We’ll continue to be wary because our experience of the alcohol industry is pretty negative.”
When asked about examples of productive collaboration between the alcohol industry and public health groups, Hall described the nine-year project to reform alcohol laws and health policies in Alaska, which unanimously passed in 2022. Title 4 Rewrite included alcohol control policies like keg registration, license fee increases, and penalties for licensees who over-serve or serve an underage person, while the alcohol industry got expanded hours at manufacturer tasting rooms, expanded tourism licenses, and reduced penalties for minor code violations. “We both had some things we didn’t love, but we found the shared points and just moved what we could forward,” she says. “It’s tough.” But in Oregon an attempt this year at a collaborative effort to use tax increases to fund addiction, prevention, and treatment services stalled over a clash between the alcohol industry and economists and the CDC; and in New Mexico, which has the highest rate of alcohol-related deaths in the U.S., a 2023 bill proposing a 25-cent increase in alcohol tax failed to pass amid accusations of alcohol industry lobbying. (Two similar new bills will be debated in the 2025 legislative session.)
There are some areas in which both sides of the debate agreed that progress could be achieved. These include: greater transparency in labeling; some restrictions on advertising; prevention of underage drinking; and on-premise staff training. “I recognize that a lot of these are shared goals at the local level,” says Hall. “I know most individual alcohol retailers don’t want it to get into the hands of children. Those are some of the policies that we look to because, number one, children do still find a way to drink, and, number two, everyone can agree on that.”
Catena, too, agrees that the government and the alcohol industry should be working hard to prevent alcohol-related harm and has some empathy for the point of view of the alcohol control advocates. “It’s coming from a good place in the sense that they’re saying ‘I don’t care about these people that drink in moderation, that it’s good for them. I care about all the harm that alcohol is doing.’ … But people who drink in moderation have lower all-cause mortality than people who don’t drink and they can’t accept that.”
Which comes back to the contested review of the U.S. dietary guidelines currently taking place and why so many in the alcohol industry are deeply concerned about its results. While these recommendations normally fall under the purview of National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, this year a supplementary study by the Interagency Coordinating Committee for the Prevention of Underage Drinking was commissioned, which, besides being outside the committee’s core responsibility of preventing underage drinking, is not subject to the same review process or protocol and features some researchers who were also involved in the rejected, stringent Canadian guidelines. More than 110 bipartisan members of Congress have called on the government to shut down the study.
“The study that they’re undertaking is duplicative at best,” says Representative Thompson, who co-authored the letter with Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican of Washington. “We’re not clear on what their target is, nor has anybody really seen any evidence that they were vetted and the right people to do this. All of their work has been done in relative secrecy. It’s not only a waste of money and a waste of time, but it should cause people to be skeptical.”
What it comes down to is a question of proportionality. Are the controls in place around the sale and consumption of alcohol in step with the harm it causes? Both communities in this debate have different answers, because they’re looking in different directions: one toward that harm, and the other toward the craft, culture, and business of drinks. For now, at least, everyone is focused on one thing: the outcome of the U.S. dietary review, when the country will decide which direction to take its alcohol health policy forward.
Dispatch
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Tyler Wetherall is the senior editor for SevenFifty Daily and the Beverage Media Group publications. Her drinks journalism has appeared in publications including Punch, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, Thrillist, and The Spirits Business, which awarded her the Alan Lodge Young International Drinks Writer of the Year. Tyler is also the author of No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run, and her first novel, Amphibian, is forthcoming. Follow her on Instagram at @tylerwrites.
