Human beings have always known the hazards of drinking, from making a fool of yourself in public to premature death by various routes. But recent medical research has suggested that it can also lengthen life, at least when handled sensibly.
Plenty of articles in the scholarly and popular press have reported this revelation. And it has the endorsement of the United States government. Now the California wine industry has proposed to publicize the scientific evidence in an exceedingly careful and discreet way. The Wine Institute has asked the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to approve an optional label with the following message: “To learn the health effects of moderate wine consumption, send for the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” followed by an address.
Those guidelines are less than giddy about the benefits of alcohol. They note that it can cause a variety of serious ailments, damage the brain and make you fat; they argue that certain people (including children, pregnant women and problem drinkers) should avoid it entirely; and they stress that moderation, defined as no more than one drink a day for women and two from men, is critical. But they also acknowledge that “moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk for coronary heart disease in some individuals.”
The proposed label could hardly be more innocuous, but it still has managed to spark outrage at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a left-of-center group that thinks Americans should be protected against any information they might misuse. CSPI urged ATF to reject the label, claiming that it will mislead people into believing that they should drink for their health and serve the wine industry’s interest in bigger profits.
Mislead? It’s not misleading to direct consumers to information pointing out, accurately, that some people will indeed enjoy better health and live longer if they drink responsibly. Some people will not, of course–which is why labels on alcoholic beverages already carry a government-required warning about the health dangers of drinking. In a free society, when legal products are involved, the custom is to provide information and let competent adults make their own decisions.
Of course, wineries may make more money if some people decide they don’t need to avoid a glass of wine with dinner–just as CSPI may get more contributions if some people applaud its prohibitionist stance. But neither outcome is a tragedy the federal government should strive to avert. The Wine Institute’s request is a perfectly reasonable one. Its opponents need to sober up.
