The State of Oregon's Confused Relationship to Alcohol
The state of Oregon taxes beer and wine, bringing in tens of millions of dollars, which for a budget the size of Oregon’s, isn’t a huge amount. But the state also strictly regulates liquor sales, and from this extracts hundreds of millions of dollars from the sale of spirits. (I think it’s around $500 million a year, but I honestly have a hard time parsing the revenues now that liquor and cannabis have been rolled up into one agency.) A hundred million here and a hundred million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
The state is also aware of how central its alcohol industries are to travel. This spring, I attended the Oregon Governor’s Conference on Tourism, where the state presented the results of a big study of visitors to the state. The second biggest draw, after natural scenery, was food and drink, cited by 86% of visitors as one of the major reasons they visited. Even though those folks were already very excited about the food and beverage scene, they reported, by a 5.5% margin, being even more impressed by the food and drink than they expected. Travel Oregon, which receives around $45 million a year from the state through hotel fees, spends a lot of time promoting Oregon’s locally made wine, beer, and spirits. And finally, the state also collects a small fee on grapes produced in the state, funds that are directed to the Oregon Wine Board, a semi-independent agency whose sole purpose is to promote Oregon wine.
In other words, Oregon is very much in the business of booze. So why is it also trying to kneecap the industries it otherwise supports?
In 2022, the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) created a marketing program to target alcohol called Rethink the Drink. The intention, the OHA said, was to “reduce excessive drinking”—a laudable goal. Yet from the start, Rethink periodically veered into overt attacks on any drinking, including a controversial television spot. The internal conflict is evident even in the program’s title, which isn’t “Rethink the Third Drink,” or something suggesting moderation. No matter the disclaimers, the name and messaging point to the more less nuanced view that alcohol is bad, period.
Which brings us to last month, when Rethink posted that graphic you see at the top of the post. Without any context at all, it equated alcohol with asbestos. Of course, there is no way to “moderate” your intake of asbestos. Even lumping alcohol with tobacco is at best a poor analogue; most smokers are addicted, while very few of the two-thirds of Americans who drink are. But asbestos and tobacco are unpopular and frightening, which points to the subtext: a can of beer is just as scary.
I would certainly forgive local breweries for feeling especially targeted, because their signature, home-grown style is called out in the ad. In putting “IPA” on the label of the beer cans, I can’t see any other interpretation but that this is a direct shot at the local breweries who have made IPA famous. (It’s interesting they left wine out of the crosshairs; there’s no bottle with “Pinot” written on it. The aforementioned TV spot targeted wine and got a ton of blowback, so maybe this played a role.)
I never want to minimize the actual harms alcohol causes. Somewhere between 7-10% of drinkers have a problem with alcohol (definitions move the figure around). Drunkenness can spark violence and it kills thousands of people on the road every year. It is important to reduce these numbers. I won’t speak for the wine and spirits industry, because I haven’t interviewed enough of them to know, but local breweries are aware of the dangers of their product and support efforts to reduce alcoholism and drunk driving.
That said, I find it mystifying that the State of Oregon, which depends on local alcohol producers in so many ways, would create an in-house marketing program that attacks the very industries it otherwise praises. Pete Danko, writing in the Portland Business Journal last week, reported that the OHA doubled down on the new ad when asked about it. Their spokesperson told Danko:
"The findings confirm that the more alcohol one consumes, the greater their risk of cancer… This report [from the U.S. Surgeon General last year] also notes that public awareness of cancer risk associated with alcohol use is lower than asbestos and tobacco.“
That is a pretty stark statement, and gone is any talk of “moderation.” I had a look at the report the spokesperson mentioned, and it is actually far more nuanced and circumspect than the OHA. It gets into the question of risk by discussing the difference between absolute and relative risk. If the relative risk of drowning increases 100% (an alarming figure), to use the example they cite, the absolute risk doubles from one to two in a thousand (a less alarming figure). Both absolute and relative risk figures tell you something, but absolute risk tells you more.
The furthest the Surgeon General would go is this: “For certain cancers, like breast, mouth, and throat cancers, evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day.” (My emphasis.) That is, after a certain threshold of consumption, the cancers with the greatest association to alcohol may start to increase. That’s quite a bit different than the way the OHA characterized them, which mentioned nothing of thresholds or risk levels: “the more alcohol one consumes, the greater their risk of cancer.” The Surgeon General continues with an example that explains the risk in much more detail:
“For example, a study of 226,162 individuals d reported that the absolute risk of developing any alcohol-related cancer over the lifespan of a woman increases from approximately 16.5% (about 17 out of every 100 individuals) for those who consume less than one drink per week, to 19.0% (19 out of every 100 individuals) for those who consume one drink daily on average to approximately 21.8% (about 22 out of every 100 individuals) for those who consume two drinks daily on average. That is about five more women out of 100 who would have developed cancer due to a higher level of alcohol consumption.”
I will let you decide how risky this sounds. It’s significant. It’s the kind of information people should have so they can weigh the risks. It is a very, very different message than plopping asbestos and an IPA on a PSA and saying they are both in the highest risk group for cancer. In every way possible, that’s a message designed to mislead.
As long as the OHA continues to fund Rethink the Drink, we’re going to continue to have these flare-ups. What I would ask political leaders in Salem is this: why are you funding a program that attacks important industries you depend on, particularly when the quality of the messaging is at this level? What is the thinking here? I might even add: isn’t it hypocritical for a state to make hundreds of millions of dollars from an industry they promote and turn around and attack them with misleading ads?