The NIAAA and Big Alcohol

Officials halt government study on moderate drinking funded by alcohol industry

The New York Times reports: “The extensive government trial was intended to settle an age-old question about alcohol and diet: Does a daily cocktail or beer really protect against heart attacks and stroke?

To find out, the National Institutes of Health gave scientists $100 million to fund a global study comparing people who drink with those who don’t. Its conclusions could have enshrined alcohol as part of a healthy diet.
As it turned out, much of the money for the study came from the alcohol industry. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that officials at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) part of the N.I.H., had solicited that funding from alcohol manufacturers, a violation of federal policy.

On Friday, an advisory panel to Dr. Francis Collins, director of the N.I.H., recommended that the trial be stopped altogether. Shortly afterward, Dr. Collins agreed.”

for the rest of the story, go HERE.

7 Myths the Alcohol Industry Wants You to Believe

Staying on message in the liquor biz. 

“Our national drug is alcohol,” wrote William S. Burroughs. “We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.” This emotional loophole in the psyche has been skillfully manipulated by the alcohol and tobacco industries ever since modern advertising was invented.

 Recently, the European Alcohol Policy Alliance, known as EuroCare, put together a brochure addressing the common messages the liquor industry attempts to drive home through its heavy spending on advertising. The messages are not just designed to sell product, but also to influence alcohol policy at the political level as well. (Eurocare is a network of more than 50 voluntary non-governmental organizations working on the prevention and reduction of alcohol-related harm in 20 European countries.) According to the group, the “industry”—the alcohol and tobacco companies—“has traditionally worked closely together, sharing information and concerns about regulation. They have used similar arguments to defend their products in order to prevent or delay restrictions being placed on them (Bond, et al. 2010).”

EuroCare offers this introduction: “The intention of this brochure is to inform professionals about the attempts made by the alcohol industry to influence alcohol policy globally and to subsequently arm them against the industry’s methods to prevent effective policies from being made…. For politicians and health experts it is important that they reveal to the public the subversive messaging of the alcohol industry and do not fall prey to the industry’s half-truths—or worse—outright lies.”

Message 1: Consuming alcohol is normal, common, healthy, and very responsible.

Explanation: To bring this message home, alcohol advertisements nearly always associate alcohol consumption with health, sportsmanship, physical beauty, romanticism, having friends and leisure activities.

I note here that it’s left to the social service agencies and non-profits to attempt to convey the opposite side of the coin: a dramatically heightened risk for health problems, traffic fatalities, domestic violence, loss of job, loss of marriage, suicide—you name it.

Message 2: The damage done by alcohol is caused by a small group of deviants who cannot handle alcohol.

Explanation: Indeed, the message of the industry is that ordinary citizens drink responsibly and that ‘bad’ citizens drink irresponsibly and are the cause of any and all problems associated with high alcohol consumption.

This one is insidious and unscientific. There is no evidence that alcoholics are “bad people,” or simply unwilling to stop engaging in bad behavior. For the industry, irresponsible drinkers are a major revenue source—the dream customer— even though alcohol manufacturers continue to insist that their advertising is primarily about driving home the message of responsible alcohol consumption and brand choice.

Message 3: Normal adult non-drinkers do not, in fact, exist.

Explanation: Only children under 16 years of age, pregnant women and motorists are recognized by the industry as non-drinkers.

My personal favorite, this one. The existence of non-drinkers is seen by the industry as a threat. Accordingly, they have subtly reinforced the message that moderate drinking is not only normal, but also good for you. Never mind that the real profits come from excessive drinking and pricing strategies that encourage it. Estimates vary, but recent studies  at UCLA show that “the top 5% of drinkers account for 42%of the nation’s total alcohol consumption.” If 5% of all drinkers account for nearly half of total alcohol sales, it would be folly for the alcohol industry to get serious about encouraging moderation. It’s not too far off the mark to say that the alcohol industry’s quarterly statements hinge on the success they have in encouraging alcoholics to believe that everything’s okay, everybody drinks that way. The message becomes clearer: Drinking is mandatory—unless you’re a deviant.

Message 4: Ignore the fact that alcohol is a harmful and addictive chemical substance (ethanol) for the body.

Explanation: The industry does not draw attention to the fact that alcohol (ethanol) is a detrimental, toxic, carcinogenic and addictive substance that is foreign to the body.

Naturally, pointing out the neuroscientific parallels between alcoholism and heroin addiction is not part of the message. Alcohol is a hard drug—ask any addiction expert. Alcoholism can kill you quick. But so far, the labeling mania that struck opponents of Big Tobacco has not played out in a major way in the battle against deceptive alcohol advertising.

Message 5: Alcohol problems can only be solved when all parties work together.

Explanation: Good, effective policies to combat alcohol consumption would require a higher excise-duty, no marketing or sponsoring, an increase in the drinking age to 18, a prohibition of the illegitimate sale of alcohol, and an increase, through a campaign, in the public’s awareness of the damages that alcohol can cause (Babor et al, 2010; WHO, 2009).

Obviously, these bullet points are not high on the alcohol industry’s agenda.

Message 6: "Alcohol marketing is not harmful. It is simply intended to assist the consumer in selecting a certain product or brand."

Explanation: Meanwhile, research has indisputably demonstrated that alcohol advertisements are both attractive to young people and stimulate their drinking behavior (Anderson et al., 2009: Science Group of the Alcohol and Health Forum; 2009). Yet the industry continues to flatly and publicly deny that advertising stimulates alcohol consumption (Bond et al; 2009).

Stuffed with attractive young people meeting and mating over alcohol, it seems fair to suggest that alcohol ads had better stimulate increased drinking, i.e., a boost in quarterly sales, or else the industry is wasting a lot of money fighting over pieces of a pie that isn’t getting any bigger. These days, slow growth is no growth.


Message 7: “Education about responsible use is the best method to protect society from alcohol problems.”

Explanation: Effective measures such as a higher alcohol excise-duty, establishing minimum prices, higher age limits and advertisement restrictions can reduce alcohol related harm and will therefore decrease the profits of the industry (Babor, 2003; Babor, 2010). The industry therefore does its best to persuade governments, politicians, and policy makers that the above mentioned measures would have no effect, are only symbolic in nature or are illegitimate.

A truly great dodge, because the strategy being advertised sounds so imminently sensible. Who could be against the promotion of responsible alcohol use? Irresponsible zealots and deviants, that’s who. Why should all of us happy drinkers be made to suffer for the sins of a few rotten apples?

Indeed, all of the messages, overtly or covertly, send the same signal: You should drink more. It’s good for you.

Photo Credit: http://www.frankwbaker.com

Alcoholic Deception

Big Alcohol Wants a Piece of the Health Market

For a long time now, snack food companies have been spending billions to convince shoppers that their fattening food offerings are fit and healthy nutrition alternatives. Big Alcohol, which has played around the edges of all this with “lifestyle” beer commercials, has been pushing into the health business more steadily of late, as opportunities for advertising shrink. The Marin Institute, which has got to be Big Alcohol’s least favorite advocacy group in the world, just released its new study: “Questionable Health Claims by Alcohol Companies: From Protein Vodka to Weight-Loss Beer.” The group documents the many ways in which alcoholic beverage makers are seeking to emulate food corporations in staking a misleading claim to words like “natural” and “organic.”

“The wine industry has been exaggerating wine’s health benefits for years. Now Big Alcohol is taking such messages to a whole new level,” said Marin Institute’s Research and Policy Director Michele Simon, one of the report’s authors. “Major alcohol companies are exploiting ineffective or non-existent regulatory oversight,” she added.

The Marin Institute breaks down Big Alcohol’s advertising assault into three areas of concern: adding nutrients, using the term “natural,” and using alcoholic beverages in fitness-themed promotional campaigns. It’s a free country, more or less, and there’s no point being a prude about these things. But a deeper look at alcohol advertising strategy can be enlightening. As the Marin Institute admits, alcohol’s advertising strategies “may seem relatively harmless.” but when it comes to promoting sales, the consequences are “potentially dangerous.” And overlapping regulatory agencies don’t make it any easier. Technically, the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) is in charge of regulating alcoholic beverages, but the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has control over alcohol advertising, and determines whether it is unfair, false, or deceptive.

Here is a portion of the Marin Institute’s list of unsupported health claims:

--Fortified vodkas. Fortified foods have been around forever, but it wasn’t until 2007 that the first fortified vodka hit the market. Lotus White, infused with added B vitamins, “could actually be good for you,” said the company’s CEO. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) prohibited Lotus from advertising the B vitamins on its packaging, so CEO Bob Bailey told the press that Lotus White provided drinkers with 100% of their daily recommended intake of B vitamins. “Alcohol is bad for you,” he told the press, according to the Marin Institute report. “Ours is just slightly less bad.” The report says that retailers in Los Angeles advertise Lotus as a “Vitamin B Enhanced Super Premium Vodka.” However, since alcohol is known to inhibit the absorption of nutrients like Vitamin B1 and B12, and folic acid, Dr. R. Curtis Ellison at the Boston University Medical School says that putting B12 in alcohol is “like putting vitamins in cigarettes.” Nonetheless, sales of Lotus vodka shot up 50% in 2009, says the Marin Institute, before the company went out of business last year. In November of 2009, along came Devotion, billed as the world first “protein-infused ultra premium” vodka. Sounds more like shampoo than a shot of vodka, but adding “protein” is now another marketing angle. The problem is that these approaches appear to fail the basic health rules of the regulatory agencies, to wit, that such claims must be “substantiated by medical research.” Try this one: Fragoli, introduced three years ago, a red liquid with a little red strawberry at the top of the bottle. “Forbidden Fruit,” has been one of the company taglines. And a company press release put it this way: “In a recent scientific study, researchers found that the addition of ethanol—the type of alcohol found in most spirits—boosts the antioxidant nutrients in strawberries and blackberries.” As the Marin Institute pointed out: “While the study they referenced did find that ethanol increased antioxidant levels in berries Fragoli implies that drinking cocktails is one way for people to get those antioxidants, which the study does not conclude.”

--All-natural spirits. Flavored vodkas have been with us for decades. But the competition is brutal. By 2008, there were at least 120 flavored vodka products on the market. The Marin Institute found that in that year, “three of the five top-selling vodka companies in the U.S. had ad campaigns with fruit and positioned their products as fresh or all-natural: Absolute (2nd), Skyy (4th), and Stoli (5th). Skyy was advising drinkers to “Go Natural,” with “100% real fruit and premium Skyy vodka,” as well as its line of “all-natural infusions.” Notably, the words “infusion” and “all-natural” remain undefined by the TTB. Similarly, Blue Ice vodka was among the 84 “organic” alcohol products that came on the market between January, 2008 and October, 2009. My particular favorite is Blue Ice Organic Wheat—certified organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in a classic case of federal agencies in conflict. 

--Fitness campaigns. Miller Lite, the “healthy” beer that started it all, launched in 1973, and ever since, commercial viewers have been subject to an endless collage of young people running, dancing, and diving into crystal streams. But it was not until the diet-conscious new century that sales of light beer exploded along with low carb diets. In 2004, Great Britain went after Michelob Ultra for its “lose the carbs, not the taste,” advertising, on the grounds that the campaign implied that beer drinking was part of a healthy lifestyle. No matter; Michelob went on to sponsor the UK Olympic teams in 2006 and 2008. By 2009, Michelob Ultra had no qualms about advertising itself as “a smart choice for adult consumers living an active lifestyle.” The Marin Institute has always been particularly rankled by the mainstay of beer advertising—sponsored sporting events. When Michelob signed a three-year deal with Lance Armstrong, the Marin Institute howled, because “the advertising campaign mixed images of Armstrong exercising and consuming beer while in the context of this activity,” another violation of the advertising rules concerning alcohol consumption and health. “Probably the most blatantly illegal advertisement came in early 2009,” says the Institute’s report, “when a new beer called MGD 64 (boasting just 64 calories) sponsored an online fitness program in association with Shape and Men’s Fitness magazines.” Again, the authors argue that if FTC and TTB standards don’t apply to alcohol-sponsored weight loss programs, then what DO they cover?

If you put it all together, “such marketing represents a significant failure in the regulatory oversight of alcohol advertising.” Small wonder, since regulatory oversight is split across two or three federal agencies, 50 state beverage control agencies, and state attorneys general. Plenty of regulating to go around, if it was more sensibly deployed. But if it were, protein vodka would probably not be on the market. The Marin Institute’s modest proposal is to transfer jurisdiction over the regulation of alcohol advertising practices to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to which Congress recently granted greater powers of regulation for cigarette products. Once again, the institutional confusion and inertia caused by the artificial distinction between “legal” and “illegal” drugs is hampering efforts to effectively regulate the sale of this addictive drug.

Graphics Credit: http://www.marininstitute.org/site/

Drinking on Television

  

Does alcohol on TV make you bend the elbow?

I have a guest post at All About Addiction covering a journal article in Alcohol and Alcoholism with the unambiguous title: “Alcohol Portrayal on Television Affects Actual Drinking Behaviour.”

It is an easy and familiar accusation. Over time, it has been levied at violent video games, drug use in the movies and alcohol advertising of every stripe. But what is the actual evidence for it? Leave it to a group of Dutch scientists to design a practical experiment to test the proposition when it comes to drinking.... More.

Photo credit: http://josh-wyxl.itmblog.com/page/14/

“They’ll Drink Bucket Loads”

The subtle subterfuge of alcohol advertising.

“To own all routes to sociability; football, music, and everything else that brings the lads together, is to dominate the beer market.”

--Ad agency Mobious in Carling strategy document, 2006.

“Carling Commandments: Thou shalt never abandon your mates in favour of a girl… though shall never desert thy mates in drunken distress, thou shalt always welcome a mate’s mate.”

--Slide presentation by Hill & Knowlton advertising agency, pitching Coors for sports advertising, 2006.

“Shot used to crank up the evening, accelerate the process of getting drunk with less volume of liquid. Sense of danger. For a pleasure ride or to get blasted.”

--Slide presentation by ad agency Cheethambell JWT, 2003.

When the U.K.’s House of Commons Health Select Committee ordered up a report on alcohol last year, the resulting paper once again put the alcohol industry in the spotlight, after researchers at the University of Stirling gained access to a treasure trove of documents from four alcohol companies and their ad agencies. 

The title of the report—“They’ll Drink Bucket Loads of the Stuff”—comes from a “creative brief” prepared by the Cheethambell JWT ad agency in 2005 for the makers of Lambrini, a sparkling pear drink with a kick (7.5 % alcohol by volume) that is popular with young women:

Drinking starts early! Early afternoon at the weekend or straight after work Monday to Friday meeting your girly mates and getting on it is the only way forward…. A light, easy to drink, affordable ‘wannabe’ wine that gets their nights out or in off to a good start. They’ll drink bucket loads of the stuff and still manage to last the duration.

As in the U.S., the U.K. government has a love-hate relationship with the alcohol industry. The flashpoint for disagreement, in many cases, is advertising. Druglink (PDF), a magazine for drug treatment professionals and the criminal justice community, published its analysis of the report in the January/February 2011 issue. Editor Max Daly argues that the alcohol industry in the U.K. is adopting “a similar strategy to that used amid mounting regulation of cigarette advertising 30 years ago.”  Under increasing regulatory pressure, cigarette ads “became more and more elliptical and imaginative as the codes on content were tightened.” The supposedly restrictive advertising codes imposed on cigarette manufacturers simply “honed the advertiser’s skills—either in camouflage or creativity.”

Daly also points to a report on the use of social networking sites to promote alcohol use, prepared by Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems, an independent medical advocacy group. Facebook and other sites, the report warned, are being colonized by alcohol promoters “due to the youth appeal of these sites, the difficulties associated with enforcing age restrictions, the relative lack of regulation and the sheer volume of promotional messages. The extensive use of new media to market alcohol represents a proliferation of alcohol branded messages directed at consumers.” 

 In the U.S., Bacardi-branded Mojito Party apps were installed by more than 100,000 Facebook users in 2008. Brewing giant Anheuser-Busch hosts a “VIP micro-site” on Facebook as well. 

A few months earlier, the British Medical Association called for a thoroughgoing ban on alcohol advertising more in line with restrictions on tobacco advertising.

 The Health Select Committee’s report was met with a “furious response” by the alcohol industry, according to Daly. Simon Litherland, managing director of alcohol maker Diageo GB, claimed that “inappropriate consumer views and early proposals” were part of early marketing consultations and were subsequently rejected.

Perhaps because there were no outright examples of law breaking, or perhaps due to a change in U.K. government four months after the report was made public, “They’ll Drink Bucket Loads of the Stuff” has evidently disappeared, leaving few tracks for others to follow. As Daly concludes in the Druglink feature, “whichever political party is at Number 10, there will not be the stomach for a fight with such a powerful adversary as the British drinks industry.”

Photo Credit: http://weblogs.jomc.unc.edu