Pour Decisions: The Correlation Between the Case Against Cigarettes, Wine, and Firearms

APR 8, 2024 | Voice of Leadership Panel

Pour Decisions: The Correlation Between the Case Against Cigarettes, Wine, and Firearms

By: Michelle Scheuermann, BulletProof Communications

You might not follow wine industry news—and frankly, I don't either—until one of my favorite wine podcasts (Wine for Normal People) featured an investigative journalist. In this episode, Felicity Carter was introduced as probably the only journalist doing vital investigative work on wine, health, and the neo-prohibitionist movement.

After listening to this podcast, I went down a rabbit hole about how the wine industry's struggles now are eerily like what the hunting, fishing, and shooting spaces are seeing—a slow, global movement against us.

It all started with cigarettes.

I'm sure we all can agree cigarettes are not good for us – but this is also America, and if you like to smoke, whatever, don't do it around me. But do you remember the slow ban on cigs? How it was removed from planes (I still can't believe people smoke on an airplane), it was banned from the workplace, it was banned from bars, and finally, in many places, you can't smoke within X feet of the building. Smokers are ostracized and demoralized. And then, let's not forget the warnings, labels, and taxes. The labels on a pack of cigarettes in the UK are borderline throw-up-in-your-mouth pictures. However, it can be argued that humans don't read or pay attention to labels. I mean, have you read the ingredients of a bag of Cheetos? No. You want the orange stuff. We might be shocked to see the label at first, but then our brain (which is made to do this) will begin to ignore it.

Okay, what does this have to do with wine – and our industry?

I'm getting there.

In 2009, The Guardian (yeah, I know) published an opinion piece called "Alcohol is Worse Than Cigarettes." (First of all, the author of that piece didn't see anything yet with pandemic levels of alcohol consumption 11 years later, but I digress.) The piece draws attention to the detrimental effects of alcohol in comparison to cigarettes. It argues for similar approaches to banning alcohol advertising, as has been done with cigs, citing a study in France (France! Of all places…) where this ban was implemented successfully. The article goes on to target young people, citing a YouGov poll that showed 62 percent of the public supported banning alcohol-related ads.

In 2019, the BBC published "Is Drinking Red Wine Still Good for You?" In this piece, they talk about past studies that have shown red wine, in moderation, has been associated with potential cardiovascular benefits. However, the article flips and talks about how, potentially, cancer is linked to drinking alcohol, which they got from a 2019 research study in The Lancet.

The Lancet study establishes an association between alcohol consumption and the risk of all-cause mortality, as well as the specific risk of developing various types of cancers.

The Lancet research tries to conclude that the level of alcohol consumption that minimizes health loss is zero. The report suggests that from a health perspective, abstaining from alcohol is associated with the least amount of health loss, aligning with public health guidelines and recommendations for alcohol consumption.

Do you see how I got into a rabbit hole with this? Let me repeat that last part for you – they are claiming ZERO alcohol consumption should be the public health guidelines for optimal health, just like the marketing behind cigarettes.

Like how some people claim zero gun tolerance, zero hunting?

This, my friends, is just the beginning of banning all good things, which is how it led me to think of our industry.

I wanted to know more. Who is behind this? What is their motivation?

Would you believe the World Health Organization (WHO)?

Back to the Wine for Normal People podcast episode. In that podcast, Carter pointed out the WHO's SAFER initiative, which aims for "a world free from alcohol-related harm."

Sure, aren't we all for that?

The "R" in SAFER stands for "Raise prices on alcohol through excise taxes and pricing policies." (Just like what they did to cigarettes. Geez, original.)

The WHO states, "Alcohol taxation and pricing policies are among the most effective and cost-effective alcohol control measures. An increase in excise taxes on alcoholic beverages is a proven measure to reduce harmful use of alcohol, and it provides governments revenue to offset the economic costs of harmful use of alcohol."

What is the WHO's goal? To "turn down the flow of alcohol." I can see them saying next they want to "turn down the flow of guns," can you?

You guys – it gets even more interesting.

Carter investigated who was behind SAFER. One of the partners she found is a company called Movendi International. Who are they? Carter explains, "Movendi International is a rebranded name. They changed their name in 2020 because their real name was too weird for anybody. They were founded in 1852 in the United States, and their original name was the Order of Good Templars. They were a temperance movement that was a spin-off of the Freemasons. They were the people who were partly behind prohibition the first time round, and because they were so successful, their membership dropped."

The temperance movement is back. Or, you could argue, it never left.

Carter continues that you'll be shocked if you look at the WHO's guide for journalists and Google all the names (which she did). She found names from groups like The Noncommunicable Disease Alliance, which she said sounded great until she learned it's a member of the IOGT, the International Order of Good Templars. Carter continues to share that the folks from both NGOs give keynote speeches at Movendi conferences. She also founded the European Policy Alcohol Alliance (Eurocare), which she claims is a temperance group.

Like a wolf in sheep's clothing. We know a few things about that, don't we?

The podcast host, Schneider, asked us to re-listen to an episode from 2019 with Christopher Snowdon, Head of Lifestyle Economics for The Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK. He saw this coming back then. It's eerie.

Snowdon shared many insights into the "why" behind this push for anti-alcohol, which if you replace "alcohol" and "wine" with "guns" in this quote – you can see the playbook that's already developed against us.

"What they want is to ban all alcohol advertising and to certainly have warnings, preferably graphic warnings, on bottles and cans to push the alcohol industry out of any policy making arena. They don't want the industry to be speaking to politicians; they want to really have the politicians to themselves to get their one-sided views across and to have very high tax rates. If you asked them how high it should be, they wouldn't have an answer; it's just higher than whatever it is now. It should be higher because that reduces demand, and if you reduce demand, then you reduce alcohol consumption." – Christopher Snowdon.

Snowdon also thinks we'll see a cigarette prohibition someday. Why?

Because the people who make laws today do not smoke cigarettes, it's funny because we could agree that lawmakers in the office now did not grow up hunting, fishing, or heading to the range on the weekend.

But what about the millions of happy wine drinkers – and the millions of content gun owners – who aren't doing anything about this slow rise against them?

As Snowdon shared, "Their lives (the alcohol industry) are being made worse in a fairly small way, and the cost to them of a tax rise or a ban on shopping online is just not big enough to justify the enormous costs to them of spending hours a week doing something about it. It's a pessimistic message…that small, very aggressive, highly incentivized people will tend to beat millions of ordinary people who don't have the time and resources to do anything about it."

Again, let me highlight that last part—a small, aggressive, and incentivized group of people will beat millions of wine drinkers. Can that happen to us in the outdoor industry, too?

Let's go back to Carter, who picked up on the correlation between what happened to that industry back then and what is happening to the wine and alcohol industry today. "If you think about cigarettes, you can smoke cigarettes, and there's no problem, right? You can't smoke them in restaurants; you can't smoke them in the theater; you can't smoke them in sporting events. It means that the idea of cigarette smoking has become abnormal now. I think we all agree that it's good for tobacco use, but the World Health Organization did that, and it worked so well that they're thinking about doing that for alcohol, which means if you can't have it anywhere, you're not going to have it."

When will this playbook of taking away all our joy be pointed at us?

Okay, this is getting long, but one more point.

As Schneider shared in this podcast, there are cultural issues at play. They are changing the paradigm of drinking. "The first thing was let's prevent binge drinking, and now they're saying literally all alcohol is bad at all times, there's no safe level of alcohol use. And everyone wants to know the acceptable level of wine glasses daily."

Does this sound different from the argument about how many rounds of ammo I can buy at one time, how many I can carry, or what my magazine capacity is?

It used to be just that unfiltered cigarettes were terrible – but now all cigarettes are bad.

It used to be no binge drinking – and now the WHO is saying abstinence from all alcohol.

I'll leave you with one more thought from Schneider that correlates to our industry: "What they are asking for is zero risk, right? That's one of the problems in framing this: nothing has zero risk; you could go out of your house tomorrow and get hit by a bus."

I'm not a policy person. The struggles the tobacco and alcohol industries face are similar to what I see daily in my work as a social media and communications strategist with clients in the outdoor industry. Lastly, as Schneider reminded me, causation does not equal correlation.

Congrats if you've read this far. I welcome feedback and recommendations for a good bottle of wine at Michelle@bulletproof-comm.com.