Urgent action is needed to protect public health from alcohol industry influence and to curb alcohol-related disease and death, according to international researchers.  

“The alcohol industry has a serious, and dangerous, conflict of interest between its health-related education and policy-influencing activities, and its commercial priorities,” they say.

That warning comes in one of a series of reports published this year in Future Healthcare, The Lancet Public Health, Addiction, and other journals, all pointing to the same conclusion: Alcohol is one of the world’s leading drivers of preventable disease, yet industry tactics routinely delay or weaken health protections to maximize sales and profits.

The numbers are stark. Alcohol consumption accounted for 2.6 million deaths worldwide in 2019. It was recently shown to increase the risk of developing at least seven types of cancer: mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, liver, colorectal, and female breast.

The toll also extends far beyond individual drinkers. Like tobacco, the alcohol industry also fuels broad population-level secondhand harms, including injuries and deaths. Those impacts have been substantially underestimated until now due to a lack of data and modern analysis techniques, researchers say this month in The Lancet Public Health. 

For example, a recent U.K. study using advanced methodology to study the global health burden of alcohol found nearly 300,000 deaths from road injuries in 2019 were attributable to alcohol use—far outnumbering prior Global Burden of Disease estimates of 45,400 deaths. 

Intimate partner violence, fetal alcohol syndrome, developmental disorders, and rising rates of mental distress are all tied to alcohol use, affecting millions of people who do not choose to drink. If studies included alcohol-related harm to others, they would be likely to reveal substantially higher burdens for women and children, researchers say.

A global health crisis driven by the drinks industry

While young people and those in Eastern Europe, Central and Southern Sub-Saharan Africa are disproportionately affected by alcohol’s harms, researchers stress that the risks are just as pressing in wealthy countries like the U.S., where the number of alcohol-related deaths nearly doubled over the last 25 years.

Most recently in the U.S., drinking rates have hit historic lows as public awareness of alcohol’s harms grows. Yet even as consumption declines, the federal government withdrew a long-awaited study about alcohol and its health harms, showing that even one drink a day raises the risk of liver cirrhosis, oral cancer, and esophageal cancer.  

Instead, a competing report concluded that moderate drinking is healthier than abstinence—a conclusion long favored by the alcohol industry. Several members of that panel came under criticism for financial ties to alcohol makers, raising alarms among public health experts about conflicts of interest. The report is one of two reviews intended to inform the upcoming U.S. Dietary Guidelines’ recommendations on alcohol consumption.

The World Health Organization (WHO), which has said no level of alcohol consumption is safe, has called for countries to cut global alcohol use by 20% by 2030. Yet most are on track to miss that goal. Governments, researchers say, have too often allowed alcohol manufacturers and their proxies to operate with little constraint, especially as shifting drinking habits lead it to new markets.

For instance, the industry is permitted to self-regulate alcohol product labeling and provide information and ‘education’ campaigns aimed at the public, including in schools. But alcohol is not just another consumer product, and should not be treated like one, according to one of the studies, co-authored by Prof. Mark Petticrew, Dr. May van Schalkwyk, and Prof. Cécile Knai. 

“In conflict with the evidence, the industry is often treated by government and society as if it were a legitimate health policy actor, as opposed to a commercial producer and retailer of a harmful, addictive product,” they say.

Alcohol industry tactics under scrutiny

Research published this year describes how alcohol companies around the world deploy a familiar tobacco industry playbook: distorting evidence of harm, lobbying aggressively to block reforms, funding “responsibility” campaigns that normalize drinking, and shifting blame for problems onto consumers. 

These tactics, they warn, are designed not only to block regulations but also to influence public perception, fostering the idea that drinking is a personal choice rather than a widespread driver of disease. Responsibility campaigns—often funded by alcohol companies—promote moderation while leaving industry practices unexamined.

Examples span the globe:

• In the Philippines, transnational alcohol corporations used corporate social responsibility programs to burnish their public image while lobbying against stricter regulations.
• In South Africa, which is reported to have some of the world’s highest consumption rates, the industry delayed tighter rules by framing them as harmful to jobs, in what researchers call “regulatory capture.”
• In Portugal, warning labels and population-wide measures were portrayed as unnecessary or even harmful, while public health advocates were cast as “Bad Actors.” Alcohol-related harms were frequently downplayed, and blame was shifted onto a minority of irresponsible drinkers.
• And in Canada, one team of researchers found alcohol companies lobbying senior officials at levels “substantial and disproportionate” to public health groups. Another study found the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research (ISFAR) routinely promoted alcohol’s supposed health benefits while minimizing evidence of harm, regardless of study quality.

The parallels with Big Tobacco are not lost on researchers, especially as tobacco companies push new products from vapes and snus to nicotine pouches using the same scientific and political practices.

“We’ve seen this playbook before with the tobacco industry trying to discredit science around smoking’s harms,” says Dr. Tim Stockwell, co-author of the ISFAR study and former director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Abuse Research.

Calls to keep the alcohol business out of public health

Earlier this year, a new European Health Alliance on Alcohol was launched in Amsterdam to campaign for the reduction of alcohol-related injuries and illnesses. A UN general assembly meeting on non-communicable diseases convening next week [Sept. 25] has also been expected to include a discussion of alcohol-related illness. But early reports suggest the draft agreement intended to curb diseases caused by alcohol, tobacco, and unhealthy foods has been watered down under industry pressure.

The alcohol industry should be treated the same way as other health-harming industries, including tobacco and ultra-processed food, with a focus on protecting children, young people, and those from lower socioeconomic groups, researchers say. It is also important to highlight how industries that produce harmful products fund, lobby, and partner with others to dispute evidence that products are harmful, they say.

Sweeping reforms should include higher taxes, tighter restrictions on marketing and availability, and exclusion of the alcohol industry from any role in health policymaking, among other measures, researchers say. Most importantly, it needs to be widely accepted that the alcohol industry has no competence in any area of public health or education, say Petticrew and his colleagues. 

“Involvement of the alcohol industry (both the alcohol corporations, and those funded by them) in the setting of health policy agendas or in health promotion activities needs to be recognized as unethical and harmful,” they say.

In another report, Prof. Anna Gilmore and her colleagues put it even more bluntly: “With just four commercial products–tobacco, fossil fuels, ultra-processed food and alcohol–estimated to cause between a third and almost two third of global deaths, the need to address such harms could not be more urgent.” 

Reference

Gilmore AB, Barry RA, Fabbri A. Why addressing conflicts of interest is essential to progress in reducing commercially driven health harms: Lessons from tobacco. Future Healthcare Journal. 2025;12(2):100268. doi:10.1016/j.fhj.2025.100268

Griswold MG, Karriker-Jaffe KJ. Alcohol’s health burden: Secondhand harms matter. The Lancet Public Health. 2025;10(9). doi:10.1016/s2468-2667(25)00198-7

Petticrew M, van Schalkwyk MC, Knai C. Alcohol industry conflicts of interest: The pollution pathway from misinformation to alcohol harms. Future Healthcare Journal. 2025;12(2):100270. doi:10.1016/j.fhj.2025.100270

Wiseman A. Countering industry promotion of harmful products to protect public health. Future Healthcare Journal. 2025;12(2):100269. doi:10.1016/j.fhj.2025.100269

Wong T, Böttcher L, Chou T, D’Orsogna MR. Alcohol-induced deaths in the United States across age, race, gender, geography, and the COVID-19 pandemic. PLOS Global Public Health. 2025;5(9). doi:10.1371/journal.pgph.0004623