Skip to main content
Skeptics of Oregon’s beer and wine industry are jousting with its boosters in the latest effort to influence how health officials characterize and manage the perils of alcohol.
The latest dust-up began, as the Portland Business Journal reported last week, with a June letter from a collection of alcohol industry trade groups to the Oregon Health Authority, critiquing the agency’s messaging on alcohol.
OHA had published an ad comparing alcohol to asbestos and tobacco, which the alcohol trade groups said omitted important context. (“Group 1″ carcinogens also include substances with better PR, like processed meat.) The alcohol trade groups, which included the Oregon Wine Council and the Oregon Beer & Wine Distributors Association, argued OHA had implied an equivalence of danger between the substances that the underlying science does not support.
In a response letter early this month, OHA defended the accuracy of its work and noted that excessive alcohol use kills more than 3,000 Oregonians per year, making it one of the state’s leading causes of preventable death.
Then, on Wednesday, a third letter arrived—this one from alcohol critics seeking to ballast support for OHA’s line. “Public health agencies have an obligation to communicate established cancer risks to the public, particularly given persistent evidence that most Americans remain unaware of the connection between alcohol and cancer,” said the letter from the Oregon Alcohol Policy Alliance, addressed to interim OHA director Fariborz Pakseresht.
The latest debate seems to be animated in part by alcohol industry defensiveness amid a broad retreat in U.S. drinking culture, but the basic contours of the dispute run deeper. All three letters explicitly mentioned a 2024 dispute, when alcohol industry groups objected to an OHA advertisement that vilified wine. In its more recent missive, the industry collective cited a contentious 2021 ECOnorthwest study, which found that taxing alcohol more would lead to only a modest reduction in its consumption.
The core upshot of this study, however, continues to be litigated. The Oregon Alcohol Policy Alliance’s letter cites past WW’s reporting that experts, including from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, felt the study relied on flawed research that was tainted by alcohol industry funding. OHA, for its part, said in its letter this month that the study’s findings support using pricing as a public health tool among others to manage alcohol’s harms.
Still, all factions ultimately agreed on one thing: Public health agencies should follow objective science where it leads. “Reasonable people can disagree about public policy,” the alcohol trade groups’ letter said. “What should not be controversial is expecting state agencies to present complete, balanced, and objective information.”
