This may come as a surprise to those of you who remember my Friday afternoon announcements on the twitters at 5:00 pm that it was “scotch o’clock,” as I grasped my crystal tumbler of Bowmore 18, but that was typically my one drink of alcohol a week. My wayward youth being well behind me, I’m not much of a drinker anymore. An occasional glass of wine and perhaps a beer on a sultry evening, but that’s pretty much it.
So why care that there are six unknown bureaucrats in a basement boiler room at Health and Human Services about to decree that no amount of alcohol is safe?
The 2025 dietary guidelines review process is currently underway in Washington, D.C., and the guidelines, among other things, will provide recommendations for how much booze Americans should drink. According to reports, it’s looking like Prohibition is about to make a silent comeback.
The dietary guidelines are meant to inform Americans about healthy nutrition—a task at which the government has already proven to be middling at best—and provide guidance about how much alcohol is safe. The guidelines are updated every five years, and the process is spearheaded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Some of us will recall when we learned that the food pyramid urging us to consume lots of carbs was written not by doctors or scientists, but lawyers for Big Carb. And Americans got larger. Well, the lawyers are out now, but the scolds have seized control.
For several decades, the guidelines have said that men can safely consume up to two alcoholic beverages a day and women one. In recent years, however, pressure has been mounting to revise these recommendations downwards, with the World Health Organization (WHO) going so far as to declare that “no amount of alcohol is safe.” It appears the 2025 dietary guidelines could be the vehicle by which the United States adopts this neo-prohibitionist stance.
Why the consumption amount would differ between men and women (and what about intersex people?) when sex is merely a social construct remains a mystery, but it will be straightened out when the new guidelines provide that the only safe amount of alcohol is no alcohol.
While HHS is nominally leading the guidelines revision, it has assigned an entity called the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD) to investigate the evidence regarding the alleged health impacts of alcohol and then report back to the dietary guidelines authors. The findings of the ICCPUD will be used to inform the final guidelines.
If you’ve never heard of the ICCPUD, you’re not alone. As the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal describes, it is a “secretive, six-person panel” that conducts a “parallel, opaque review process” and “operates deep within the [HHS], receiving little scrutiny from the public.”
One of the reasons why the Supreme Court’s reversal of Chevron deference was the right decision is that too often, unknown bureaucrats with activist axes to grind are in control of decisions that the government will then ram down our collective throats for our own good.
In modern-day America, the fact that six obscure bureaucrats, whom no one has ever heard of, could be the deciding voice on a major public policy issue may come as little surprise to the government cynics among us. But it gets worse. The Wall Street Journal reports that half of the committee has already made up its mind that alcohol is harmful, with three of the six members having published their own studies on the alleged harms of alcohol. In addition to the anti-alcohol outcome being baked into this temperance pie, half of the committee also resides in Canada—they don’t even live in the United States.
But who cares, you ask? Just because the government implored you to eat pasta and bread six times a day didn’t mean you actually had to do it. And if the government says no alcohol is safe, nothing prevents you from invoking Ted Cruz’s mantra:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), channeling the spirited defiance of our anti-prohibition forefathers, declared his commitment to continue imbibing unabated: “If they want us to drink two beers a week, frankly they can kiss my ass.”
As unpleasant as that image may be, there are likely to be real world consequences should the “no booze is good booze” prohibition go through.
The stakes could not be higher for the future of imbibing. A “no safe amount” declaration in the dietary guidelines—or even a recommendation of just two drinks per week like was put forth in Canada—would be a potentially crippling blow to the alcohol industry. The industry is already struggling with decreasing alcohol consumption levels among younger Americans—a phenomenon that makes a government alcohol crackdown especially obtuse . Not only could a no-safe-level declaration cause a further drop in drinking, but it would likely trigger a wave of class action lawsuits against big alcohol companies, similar to the tobacco company settlements of prior decades.
The price of my Bowmore will soar. Doctors will tell their patients at every visit about how their three beers a week is the new silent killer. Scolds in Congress and state leges will impose ever higher sin taxes on alcohol, because it’s not taxed enough already, until they finally ban it outright “for the children.” And there will be lawsuits as harms galore are imputed to the demon rum.
But what, you ask, if they’re right, and alcohol is a threat to society and no amount of alcohol is safe?
A decision of such immense importance should not be spearheaded by a secret committee, buried deep within a federal government agency, and comprised of six unelected individuals (half of whom have already made up their minds and reside abroad).
Regardless of what the correct, or at least best, answer may be as to the amount of alcohol that can be safely consumed, neither industry lawyers nor activist scolds hiding in the basement of a bureaucratic agency should be making the decision for us.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Prohibition 2.0. We speak for Science. We now have the right tools and the right people to do the job.
We will do it the right way, this time, and we will triumph. By Any Means Necessaryy, including the Eliot Ness AI robot Advisory Committee.
There’s something very wrong with the public health establishment, not just in the US but in the industrialized West in general. It seems to be based on the idea of completely eliminating any risk or harm, however small, but that isn’t how normal, sane human beings live.
A normal adult might do things like ride motorcycles, smoke cigarettes, participate in combat sports, or skydiving, or horseback riding. He’s probably had a night or six in his life when he’s overdone it on the alcohol. He’s probably tried some form of illicit drug at least once. Yet with all this, he remains firmly within what we consider to be the normal range of risk-tolerance for a rational adult.
If the public health establishment were embodied in an actual person, that person would look very different from our “median normal” example above. We’re talking about a man who never drank, and never smoked. He never salts his food and he wouldn’t risk a soft-boiled egg. He drives under the speed limit, without fail, if indeed he drives at all. And he never touched his wife throughout the recent pandemic, except possibly making love through a plastic sheet with a hole cut out of it*.
Is this an optimally healthy person? I think we would say he goes beyond being merely a spineless weenie, into the realm of diagnosable anxiety disorders. Certainly, nobody would elect such a man to lead them by popular vote.
*Actual recommendation from Health Canada.
We humans have a terrible time dealing with the concept of risk. When it is expressed in numerical form, with distributions and uncertainties, even professionals lose their minds over small risks. But most of the time, only words are used to describe risks, and they are woefully inadequate to accomplish much in the way of understanding and dealing with it.
Words are much better tools to stoke fear and panic and bad decision making, and that is what happens. Crises are generated, and movements established to deal with the crises.
I guess that it’s time to ditch my orange juice and bread as both have measurable amounts of ethanol in them.
Ecclesiastes 9:7.
“Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.”
“‘The stakes could not be higher for the future of imbibing'”
The maximalism is the medium.
The nanny state has been out of control for years.
Also good on you for being able to afford Bowmore 18, I make do with discount brand mate McClelland’s..
As we say in the South, “Hold my beer.”
I golf quite a bit. There’s nothing quite as good as a cold beer or twelve when you come into the clubhouse after 18 holes of golf.
It’s DARE for adults. Spend tons of money and employ multitudes of otherwise useless individuals to induce curiosity and foment rebellion by spewing pseudoscientific claptrap, thereby increasing experimentation with and consumption of the proscribed substance(s) by the targeted group.
Luckily for us, smokinng weed is totally safe. I expect to see rising rates of throat and lung cancer along with emphysema in the next 10 to 15 years.
It will be a great mystery, at first.
Well, cars are unsafe too, causing about 40,000 deaths a year. Airplanes too. How about skydiving? How about contact sports?
Ban everything.
The phrase “no amount of alcohol is safe.” has its origins in the fights over the safety of nuclear energy since the late 1950s. ” There is no known safe level of exposure to radiation. ” Has anyone seen or heard this?.
It is actually true, because there are known mechanisms for one ” hit” by ionizing radiation to cause cancer or a genetic mutation. But unmentioed is the fact that everyone suffers about 14000 of these “hits” by ionizing radiation, every second of their lives, from mostly natural sources, or medical treatments. It is not possible to reduce this number to zero. We all do eventually die, but our body has developed ways to deal with them.
This is likely true of alcohol, and lots if other known or suspected carcinogens, some of which are actually produced in the body, by normal human physiology.
So, the saying is true, but meaningless, as applied to radiation, alcohol, and many other terrifying substances. But it is useful, if you want to control people.