The Biden Surgeon General’s Alcohol Warning Is Just The Tip Of The Prohibition Iceberg
As Americans greeted their New Year’s Day hangovers with pledges to lay off the sauce, the Biden administration took a major step towards making every month Dry January.
Last week, Biden’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory “outlining the direct link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk.” Murthy wants health warnings on all alcohol products that mention cancer risk, as well as “a reassessment of the guideline limits for alcohol consumption to account for cancer risk.”
It may sound like benign bureaucratic jargon. But it’s far worse than that.
As The Daily Wire reported in October, a secret committee working deep behind the scenes of the Biden administration is working to revise federal dietary guidelines regarding alcohol. The Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD) is a six-person panel working within the Department of Health and Human Services. But instead of just trying to keep kids from drinking, this panel reportedly wants the United States to adopt the World Health Organization’s position that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.”
Now, I love an “I told you so” moment as much as the next keyboard warrior. But this is no reason to gloat. The bureaucracy’s push to stop Americans from drinking is a dangerous development, and not just because it’s profoundly lame. It’s the latest sign of how leftists want to use the government to meddle in Americans’ daily lives. And it’s not even based on real science.
Murthy notes that “alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States.” He further notes that “for breast cancer specifically, 16.4% of total breast cancer cases are attributable to alcohol consumption.”
Much like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, I’m not a biologist. So I have no reason to doubt these statistics. But whenever a government official starts calling for a total ban on anything for my own good, I get suspicious. Banning things that can be unhealthy when consumed in excess is the first step towards nanny statism and universal health care. It’s downright European.
Or, in this case, Canadian. As we previously reported, three of the ICCPUD’s six members are Canadians who helped slash the number of recommended drinks in their frozen homeland back in 2013. That recommendation didn’t even play well in Canada, a country that has basically thrown its hands up and accepted euthanasia and leaders like Justin Trudeau as inevitabilities.
The mere presence of Canadian health bureaucrats should be enough to disqualify whatever the ICCPUD recommends. But there’s also a new study from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Math, which found that “compared with never consuming alcohol, moderate alcohol consumption is associated with lower all-cause mortality.”
That study is hardly biased towards alcohol. In fact, it includes the same cancer statistics that Murthy cites in his advisory. But it also looks at other areas, and finds that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with a lower risk of both heart attack and stroke, compared to never drinking at all.
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There’s also a recent Harvard study that found moderate drinking lowered blood sugar and was associated with lower rates of diabetes as well as lower rates of “thyroid cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and renal cell carcinoma.” Looking at the whole board, the authors conclude that “the data do not justify sweeping statements about the [negative] effects of moderate alcohol consumption on human health.”
Murthy probably won’t get his warning labels. Such a change would require congressional approval, and if the bipartisan opposition to the new drinking guidelines is any indication, it seems unlikely that Congress would vote to slap cancer warnings on liquor bottles.
But Murthy’s advisory is telling nonetheless. Biden is packing up the Oval Office, and his Surgeon General is trying to bring back Prohibition. That would be shocking, if his boss wasn’t spending this time trying to sell off pieces of the border wall, stop offshore drilling, and smuggle in all sorts of policies that would hamstring the incoming Trump administration.
It’s a troubling reminder of how Democrats act when they have power, and of what their priorities will be the next time they take the White House. Fortunately, we won’t have to deal with that for at least the next four years.
I’ll drink to that.