The public health debate on alcohol: why we are in it
Our founder and CEO Mike Coppen-Gardner is quoted in a new investigation published yesterday by The Drinks Business, the opening piece in a series examining who is really shaping the debate around alcohol and health. It is a question worth taking seriously, because the answer reveals something important about how regulated industries get outmanoeuvred, and why communications strategy matters when the science is contested.
On 4 January 2023, the WHO European Regional Office issued a press release stating there was "no safe level" of alcohol consumption. The language was deliberate and the timing was not coincidental. What had previously been the WHO's agreed formulation, "harmful use of alcohol," deployed for nearly two decades, was being displaced. The phrase "harmful use" implies that non-harmful use also exists. That is precisely why civil society organisations had been lobbying to remove it.
A peer-reviewed analysis in Globalization and Health published in 2025 documents how multiple NGO submissions through 2019 challenged the language on precisely those grounds: not because the science had changed, but because the framing had become inconvenient.
Mike's point in the article is direct. "That is not a scientific argument. That is a prohibitionist argument. The WHO eventually moved in their direction. The science followed the objective."
Here is the rub: when the objective comes first and the evidence is arranged around it, that is not public health policy. It is advocacy dressed in the language of public health policy.
The science itself is genuinely contested. The "J-curve" relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and cardiovascular health has been reported consistently across decades of peer-reviewed literature. Light to moderate drinking is associated with lower cardiovascular mortality compared to abstention. Attempts to discredit that finding have not been conclusive: recent studies separating lifetime abstainers from former drinkers have not confirmed the misclassification hypothesis that critics rely on.
A question with that degree of scientific complexity does not resolve neatly into a three-word slogan. "No safe level" is not the conclusion of the evidence, it is a position.
SPQR works in regulated and contested industries because that is where communications work is hardest and where the stakes are highest. The drinks sector is a clear case in point: a coalition of advocacy organisations, public health officials and institutional bodies has established a dominant public narrative, research funding flows in one direction, and counter-evidence is treated as industry capture. The industry finds it difficult to engage because any intervention is framed as self-interested, whatever its merits.
Our Belief Intelligence framework is built around a specific question: what do audiences actually believe, as distinct from what organisations are saying? The gap between those two things is where reputations erode. The drinks industry has spent years communicating responsibility messaging at audiences whose underlying beliefs about alcohol and health are being shaped elsewhere, by people with a clearer sense of what they want the argument to be.
The Drinks Business series raises the right question, while Mike's contribution names the mechanism. The industry needs to engage with it.
