Smoking, be it cigarettes or marijuana, is very bad.(1) Yet while while the federal government rightly joined us in criticizing cigarettes, they gave alcohol a free pass.
Alcohol is a legitimate carcinogen, it is addictive, it has pleasant flavors to make it more enjoyable. It is all the things nicotine government claims about nicotine, so how has it escaped nanny government when they even invent problems like "prediabetes"?
Link: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/oash-alcohol-cancer-risk.pdf
The motivations are unclear but it can't simply be money in this case. It may be that they didn't want to begin to make 'casual criminals' of so many people. Every call for limits on anything has been met with 'Prohibition doesn't work' and that is true. Cigarettes didn't decline because New York City raised taxes on cigarettes, that only led to a black market and at least one police death of a man selling 'loosies', they declined because we educated people in a way tedious government billboards and the cigarette equivalent of "Reefer Madness" commercials could not.(2)
The decline in smoking started because of epidemiology - that's right, epidemiology was once arguably the most rigorous part of science policy. They were so driven by data they were downright...conservative. Now the field is overrun with progressive anti-science activists who are determined to declare every correlation with statistical significance(3) the "next Big Tobacco" but that was not always the case.
Cigarette smoking was their first big win. After that, arguably America's best-known Surgeon General, Dr. C. Everett Koop, issued his report and it began the slow death of smoking cigarettes.
Now Dr. Vivek Murthy wants to be the Koop of alcohol.
And this time, he's right. The Biden administration has been ban happy, there is no question about that, and their abuse of agencies creating regulations acting as laws while cloaked under "Chevron Deference" was so extreme that the Supreme Court finally put a stop to 40 years of terrible manipulations created by that disastrous ruling in the past, but the science has been settled on alcohol and cancer for decades.
It's finally time for the government to do away with its 'all of our constituents do it' rhetoric and take a science stand. The reasons are also practical; with government controlling American health care, they've run out of insurance company executives to blame(4) and need to start keeping people healthier longer.
One way to do that is to begin to educate people about 100,000 cases of cancer directly linked to alcohol, and 20,000 deaths - that we are sure about. There could be a lot more when you consider co-morbidities are things were the cases are multifactorial but it is implicated in breast cancer, colon, esophagus, liver, mouth, throat, and larynx.
All of those make common sense but government doesn't always obey common sense, they obey opinion polls and and the behaviors of their constituents. So vaping was bad, despite it being overwhelmingly used to stop cigarette smoking, and throw cigars and pipes in their also and claim all nicotine is harmful despite any science, while alcohol was okay.
Probably because old people did not vape but they drink, and they vote.
At the end of a term, and with a President in office who was never entirely fit(5) not paying attention before he gives all of the elected branches of federal government over to Republicans,(6) Dr. Murthy may just be doing something he long wanted to do and speaking plainly about alcohol.
It's a good legacy, if it sticks. President Trump does not seem to be much of a drinker these days, so maybe Republicans will let this go, and try to reclaim their mantle of being the Party of Science, at least compared to Democrats, but it is hard to say.
Because politics is not always about money, sometimes it is about doing the right thing, and educating people about the harms of alcohol is the right thing to do.
NOTES:
(1) That does not mean nicotine or THC is bad, yet the Obama administration endorsed the latter, so they could tax it, while demonizing the former, so they could sue tobacco companies over it. Most science policy is about money, not public health.
(2) By going Reefer Madness on vaping, the Obama administration caused a teen surge in the vaping fad. Which the CDC then used to lobby for money claiming it was an epidemic only they could solve by buying more billboard space and making more Reefer Madness commercials. If you want to know why I had little confidence in the US CDC when writing "The Next Plague" in 2017, it's because career government union employees in the CDC couldn't tell us lettuce was tainted with E. coli until 6 weeks after it happened, they surely were not ready for a pandemic they didn't invent. And when COVID-19 hit, they showed I was correct.
(3) I was a signatory on a paper in Nature asking for editors to stop accepting statistical significance to mean 'valid' when it can easily be exploited. That didn't work, and it was no surprise because most journal staff and editors are on the political side of the aisle that hates all science that isn't done by government, which is to say nearly all of it the public ever gets. What did cause them to finally rebel was the corporations they work for using more AI.
(4) It hasn't stopped Democrats from murdering people and then 40% of them cheering it, despite the current health care shambles being what they voted to have. It was passed by their party when there were five competing plans, which made this Frankenstein mess, like the coal upsurge when Clinton banned nuclear, entirely the fault of the people now claiming only they can fix it.
(5) It was really obvious it was not just an elderly man slipping early in 2021.
That Democrats lied to their constituents about his fitness and then declared it too late to hold a legitimate primary, despite insisting that electronic ballots in 2020 were flawless, meaning a primary could be held in a week, and that caused them the election despite handing the candidate $1 billion, 300% more than their opponent, and yelling fascist and garbage about opposing voters.
(6) Relax, Democrats, you still control 90% of career bureaucratic jobs. The reason CDC allowed COVID-19 gain traction so quickly in America, despite a President saying to cut travel from China, is because of an identity-driven tribal war, with career employees are all in your party. So all you had to do to get Republicans blamed is refuse to send out testing kits, and then when Republicans forced you to do so, send out ones with faulty reagents so the results are useless. Which is exactly what CDC did.
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