Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity

Abstract

This book is about alcohol policy: why it is needed, how it is made, and the impact it has on health and well-being. It is written for both policymakers and alcohol scientists, as well as the many other people interested in bridging the gap between research and policy. It begins with a global review of epidemiological evidence showing why alcohol is not an ordinary commodity, and it ends with the conclusion that alcohol policies implemented within a public health agenda are needed to reduce the enormous burden of harm it causes. The core of the book is a critical review of the cumulative scientific evidence in seven general areas of alcohol policy: pricing and taxation; regulating the physical availability of alcohol; modifying the environment in which drinking occurs; drink-driving countermeasures; marketing restrictions; primary prevention programmes in schools and other settings; and treatment and early intervention services. The final chapters discuss the current state of alcohol policy in different parts of the world, the detrimental role of the alcohol industry, and the need for both national and global alcohol policies that are evidence-based, effective, and coordinated. This book shows that opportunities for evidence-based alcohol policies that better serve the public good are clearer than ever before, as a result of accumulating knowledge on which strategies work best.

Trans-mountain Moonshine: Liquor, Identity, and Resistance in the Appalachian and Carpathian Mountains

“…Among these, perhaps the most universally produced (and perhaps also the most valuable) is liquor (see, e.g. Babor et al 2023;Schrad 2021;Stoll 2017). For many reasons, alcohol-and distilled spirits in particular-play a crucial role in rural communities, as they have for thousands of years (Baschali et al 2017;Egea et al 2015).…”

“…In nearly every country worldwide, alcohol provides a compelling lens to examine the contestation of power, especially in the moment of nascent statehood, when local autonomy and centralized authority come most obviously into conflict (Meloni and Swinnen 2022;Stoll 2017). In every historical example, state control of alcohol is multi-faceted, combining political, economic, and sociocultural strategies to limit or eliminate the autonomy of rural communities to make, and drink, their own booze under their own social and moral conventions (Babor et al 2023). Sometimes this required restricting or criminalizing the alcohol culture that pre-dated imperial invasion (Valenzuela-Zapata and Nabhan 2003), while in other cases it meant restricting access to spirits introduced by the colonists themselves (Akyeampong 1996).…”

Using the Pan American Health Organization Digital Conversational Agent to Educate the Public on Alcohol Use and Health: Preliminary Analysis (Preprint)

“…The public health evidence, on the other hand, points clearly to solutions to alcohol harms that focus on population-level regulations such as taxation, decreased availability of alcohol, and the restriction of marketing. Health education and mass media campaigns per se have not been shown to be effective in reducing alcohol problems at the population level, particularly when they compete with the massive marketing of alcohol [20].…”

“…Although the framing of alcohol information by the alcohol industry and misconceptions about alcohol use are an ongoing and concerning issue to public health [12,17,20], during the COVID-19 pandemic, additional and more blatant misinformation, not necessarily connected to apparent economic interests, began to become widespread [18,19,24]. Claims that drinking alcohol could prevent COVID-19 infection were pervasive in several countries [25].…”

Three years of minimum unit pricing in the Northern Territory, what does the evidence say?

“…This price point was chosen specifically to target cask wine consumption [4], which had also been specifically targeted by an increase in the excise tax in 1995 [3]. In this way the MUP acts as an alternative for taxation, as has also been seen in Scotland [5]. Cask wine has high alcohol content and is associated with many harms [6], it can also be sold cheaper than other alcohol products due to differences in taxation [7].…”