But the industry’s greatest triumph lies not in rigging studies or even selective amplification, but rather in a far more subtle and intriguing long game that has unfolded over decades, dating back to Prohibition. In the early 20th century, the temperance movement was fueled by the conviction that alcohol was a nefarious substance wreaking havoc on society, causing physical, social, and moral damage to all who indulged. This mindset led to sweeping restrictions on alcohol availability, culminating in Prohibition. Though that policy ultimately crumbled under the weight of its own failures, temperance thinking persisted, inspiring a push for broad alcohol regulation throughout the 1930s, such as strict licensing requirements for bars, bans on the sale of hard liquor, and age restrictions.
At the same time, a new perspective emerged that the problem with alcohol lay in alcoholism, a condition afflicting only a small number of people. This perspective suggested that the solution wasn’t to impose broad alcohol regulation—which would, in this view, hardly affect alcoholics—but to offer specialized assistance to the unfortunate few battling the disease. Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous popped up, simultaneously embracing and perpetuating the fervent focus on a small cohort of people as the issue with drinking.
The newly legal alcohol industry realized the strategic advantages of the emerging alcoholism movement to its policy goals, so it quickly maneuvered to ensure that science embraced this viewpoint. Post-Prohibition, when alcohol researchers established the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol to monitor potential issues arising from legalized beer and wine, the industry quickly got involved. Struggling for funding, the council accepted industry support, which in turn influenced the types of research questions the brand-new council could ask. As a result, the group shifted its research focus exclusively to alcoholism, sidelining other issues, like alcohol’s role in crime, poverty, or other broader social issues.
Over the next few decades, the alcoholism viewpoint dominated. In 1970 it was enshrined in the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, whose mission is to investigate alcoholism as a disease, not alcohol as a public health problem. The industry didn’t have to keep shelling out money to further this viewpoint—it had baked it into the way the field had evolved. “The senior NIAAA people are not trained in public health. They just view it as an optional element of the science,” McCambridge said. The important thing to the NIAAA is helping people with addiction; the rest of us just needed to, as the industry tag line puts it, “drink responsibly.”