A story has spread across the Internet like wildfire in the past month that the U.S. federal government is planning to drastically restrict alcohol consumption, provoking passionate outrage among members of the alcohol industry, libertarians and those of us who enjoy a nightly glass of wine with dinner.
The story is a complete Heffalump.
One of my favorite chapters in A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh is when Piglet spies Pooh walking in the woods on a snowy day, staring at the ground. The Bear of Very Little Brain is following a set of tracks, which he believes to be a Heffalump. As he wanders, he keeps finding new tracks and he’s convinced more Heffalumps are nearby (and possibly some Woozles). After Piglet runs away in terror, Pooh belatedly realizes that he’s been circling one part of the forest, and he’s following his own footsteps.
Sometimes in our information-overload world, we end up chasing Heffalumps. This particular Heffalump pursuit started when the U.K.’s Daily Mail posted an online story: “Biden’s alcohol czar warns Americans could soon be told to limit themselves to just two beers per WEEK under strict new booze guidelines.” Three days later, a reporter from Fox News asked the White House press secretary if President Biden planned to limit Americans to just two beers a week. Members of Congress weighed in, decrying nanny-state behavior. The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America, a trade group, expressed its opposition.
Problem is, this entire panic was imaginary, starting with the words “Alcohol Czar.”
America does not have an Alcohol Czar. No one person oversees alcohol policy. The Daily Mail story was an interview with Dr. George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which is a National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency responsible for funding research into alcohol abuse. Koob is an experienced public health official and researcher but has no authority to ban anything.
Nor did he try to ban anything. Koob, who mentioned that he enjoys a couple of glasses of Chardonnay a week, only said that he was watching to see what happened in Canada. Our northern neighbor recently updated its national health guidelines to recommend men drink no more than two alcohol beverages a week and women drink no more than one.
Koob said in the interview that he agreed with recent research that finds the health risks of alcohol outweigh any benefits and that he is curious to see if Canada’s guidelines have an impact there. If those recommendations lead to any overall health benefits for the population, “I think people will start to re-evaluate where we’re at [in the U.S.],” he said.
But Koob does not control the U.S. guidelines on alcohol consumption. Part of the federal dietary guidelines, drinking recommendations are revised every five years by multiple agencies from the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Health and Human Services Department (HHS). The next set of guidelines would be released in late 2025, and the government agencies involved haven’t even selected members of the scientific community for a committee that will submit recommendations for the guidelines. No one is close to making any changes to recommended caps on alcohol consumption.
The last guidelines were issued in January 2021, and the agencies left the federal recommendations on alcohol—that women drink no more than one alcoholic beverage per day and men drink no more than two—unchanged. The agencies ended up ignoring recommendations from the committee of experts, who had suggested that men should limit themselves to just one drink a day at most.
Those dietary guidelines on alcohol don't trigger bans or even govern federal programs. They just send a message on how Americans should view alcohol consumption. So no, there’s no czar in Washington who is going to stop you from consuming more than two glasses a week. It’s a waste of time chasing that Heffalump around the tree.
But there is a much more subtle threat, and it’s no Woozle. A growing anti-alcohol lobby, with plenty of financing, is pushing not to ban alcohol, but to convince the public that any level of drinking is unhealthy. They have compared wine to cigarettes.
Alcohol abuse is a serious problem, and Dr. Koob and his colleagues do important work. But is a glass of wine with dinner the issue, or are heavy consumption and binge drinking the problems? In 2018, Koob’s colleagues at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that a little over 5 percent of American adults engaged in heavy drinking in the past year, 15.5 percent engaged in moderate drinking and 45.7 percent in light drinking; 33.7 percent did not consume alcohol.
The anti-alcohol lobby has decided that, rather than help those who drink heavily, all drinking should be discouraged. They dismiss past medical studies as biased and argue that the social benefits alcohol provides—and humans are fundamentally social creatures—are worthless.
Instead of creating imaginary menaces of nanny-state officials, maybe we need to start asking tough questions about why these advocates are so quick to dismiss any benefit to having a glass of wine with friends and loved ones over dinner. Those benefits aren’t imaginary.
