Vivek Murthy’s Booze Bait and Switch

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

The federal government, in all its wisdom, is once again gearing up to save the witless American people from themselves.

 

On Friday, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued a call to Congress demanding that lawmakers update the warning labels on alcoholic beverages to include among the various negative outcomes that accompany excess drinking an elevated risk of developing certain cancers.

 

“Many people out there assume that as long as they’re drinking at the limits or below the limits of current guidelines of one a day for women and two for men, that there is no risk to their health or well-being,” Murthy told reporters. The fools.

 

“Higher alcohol consumption increases alcohol-related cancer risk,” Murthy wrote in a social media post, “yet only 45% of American adults are aware that consuming alcohol increases their risk of developing cancer.”

 

That doesn’t sound like Americans are wholly unaware of the potential cancer risk associated with alcohol drinking, to say nothing of other potential risks drinkers invite. Indeed, the 2019 survey Murthy cites indicates that, over time, Americans have grown more aware of the risks, insofar as only 39 percent of respondents possessed such awareness in 2017.

 

Still, that American Institute for Cancer Research study suggests that broader awareness of alcohol’s risks is hindered by “messages about the healthy heart benefits of modest alcohol intake” — a misapprehension that a federally mandated label might clear up. But the same study produces similar recommendations around the consumption of red meat and cured meats — that would be a lot of warning labels — as well as diets that are low in fruit and fiber and even low rates of physical activity — try putting a label on that.

 

According to the surgeon general’s data, the “cumulative absolute risk of alcohol-related cancer” in men who drink less than one drink per week raises from 10 percent to 13 percent if they consume two drinks per day. Likewise, the risk for women who drink fewer than one drink per week increases from 16.5 percent to nearly 22 percent when they become daily consumers of two or more drinks.

 

“If an individual drinks occasionally for special events, or if you’re drinking a drink or two a week, your risk is likely to be significantly less than if you’re drinking every day,” Murthy told reporters.

 

Do Americans really need the federal government to inform them that the daily consumption of a low-dose poison is bad for their health? If they do, there is a whole range of interventions into private behaviors that the benevolent state should probably consider. Moreover, if that is your outlook, a label is wholly insufficient to the scale of the problem.

 

For decades, alcohol producers have been required to warn consumers against operating heavy machinery under the influence. Murthy laments the fact that warning labels have not been revised since 1988, and he believes Americans would benefit from easy access to a more current scientific consensus. But drunk-driving deaths declined from 21,113 in 1983 to 15,827 in 1988, prior to the labeling exercise. And recently, drunk-driving deaths have increased, from 10,084 in 2013 to 13,524 in 2023. These trends suggest that other environmental factors have far more bearing on the number of drunk drivers than the labels on their bottles.

 

Likewise, even the National Institutes of Health’s research suggests that graphic warning labels have little effect on public attitudes toward potentially harmful substances like tobacco. “Placing graphic warning labels on U.S. cigarette packs did not have an effect on smoking behavior.” Neither cigarette consumption nor cessation rates among smokers who were not ready to quit were affected by explicit warning labels, although the messages did decrease “positive perceptions of cigarettes.” But we only learned that after years of study following the widespread adoption of the erroneous consensus around the notion that “graphic warning labels on cigarette packages can increase cessation behavior among smokers.” Best practices are a moving target because the data available to policymakers are forever evolving.

 

The foremost benefit social reformers gain from forcing producers to deem their own products harmful isn’t derived from the public information campaign itself. Instead, the most reliable outcome from these campaigns is to force consumers to pay more for their consumption habits. We know how this works. To compensate for the additional cost imposed on manufacturers and to offset the losses associated with negative perceptions of their products, producers boost prices. In response, consumers will either consume less of their preferred product or transition to lower-quality alternatives.

 

That would have the effect Murthy clearly desires — lower alcohol-consumption rates, at least on the margins — but it’s disingenuous to suggest that this outcome would be a result of sudden enlightenment among consumers. It would be a byproduct of an effort to make the things the surgeon general doesn’t want you to consume more expensive via the compelling power of the state.

 

It seems to be the opinion of the surgeon general that the public needs to be tricked into believing that they’re merely endorsing a salubrious public relations campaign when in fact they’re being gulled into endorsing a burdensome regulation. And all of it is predicated on uncharitable assumptions about how dirt-stupid most Americans are, and how terribly they will mismanage their own lives absent a guiding hand. That is a common misapprehension among aspiring reformers, to say nothing of the accompanying presumption that they are possessed of an above-average capacity for rational thinking.

 

But the surgeon general’s sneaky effort to force this change on Americans — all and only for their own good — betrays a conspicuous lack of faith in the public whose health he is tasked with preserving. That attitude and the hubris that fuels it have eroded the public’s trust in America’s governing institutions. If Murthy thinks further chipping away at that trust is worth it just to decrease alcohol consumption at the margins — and in ways consumers will deeply resent — maybe he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.