The Anti-Alcohol Zealots Have Come for the LA Times

Why wine is the same as cigarettes and should be treated as such

It is, quite frankly, exhausting.

Just when you think the mainstream media has reached the absolute nadir in its pearl-clutching crusade against moderate drinking, they manage to find editorial stairs and descend even lower. On July 2, we were treated to yet another breathless, scolding commentary piece—this time published in the esteemed LA Times—entitled “Alcohol Should Be Stigmatized Like Smoking.”

Written by Dr. Emma Fenske, a physician at Oregon Health & Science University, the piece is a predictable and tedious recitation of the modern neo-prohibitionist playbook. It demands that society rapidly abandon its acceptance of alcohol by using the same tactics of stigmatization tactics that brought the tobacco industry to its knees.

By the way, the author of this anti-alcohol diatribe is the same person who recently wrote to tell us that we need safe fentanyl consumption sites—presumably not next to her home.

Nevertheless, let’s just look at the absurdity of Dr. Fenske’s own words. They are a masterclass in intellectual dishonesty.

THE VIEW FROM THE ADDICTION WARD
Let’s start with her primary credential and the lens through which she views the entire wine, beer, and spirits industry. Early in the piece, she writes:

“As a physician working in addiction medicine, I regularly care for patients whose alcohol use affects nearly every organ system. It is often not until these patients end up admitted to the hospital that they learn the effects of alcohol on various parts of their body besides their liver.”

This is the equivalent of an emergency room doc who exclusively treats catastrophic car wreck victims writing an op-ed demanding we ban automobiles.

Dr. Fenske works in addiction medicine. By definition, she interacts daily with the most tragic, most extreme, and heartbreaking, but minority of alcohol consumers: those suffering from the disease of chemical dependency. No one in the legitimate alcohol trade denies the problems of addiction or the need for robust public health resources to treat it.

But to take the pathology of the severe alcoholic and map it onto the 90-plus percent of the population that consumes alcohol in moderation, safely, and, yes, joyfully is an act of rhetorical malpractice. When your entire worldview is shaped by the tragedy of the most addicted, every glass of Pinot served on a Tuesday night looks like a ticking time bomb. It is a profoundly skewed perspective that has absolutely no business serving as the baseline for national public health policy.

THE GOOD DOCTOR’S “GROUP 1” SHELL GAME
No prohibitionist manifesto is complete without the favorite rhetorical sleight-of-hand of the modern temperance movement, and the Times piece kindly delivers:

“The World Health Organization classifies alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen — the same category as tobacco and asbestos.”

There it is. The great boogeyman. It sounds absolutely terrifying to the layperson (hell, to me too), which is exactly why Dr. Fenske and her cohort use it.

Here is what they conveniently leave out: The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which makes the classification, measures hazard, not risk. They do not measure how likely you are to get cancer from something. They only measure if a substance can cause cancer under certain circumstances and in some amount

Do you know what else is a Group 1 carcinogen right alongside tobacco, asbestos, and your evening glass of Zinfandel? Bacon. Hot dogs. Salted fish. Wood dust. AND THE SUN. Yes, the same folks that named alcohol a Group 1 carcinogen also labeled the sun so.

To say alcohol is in the “same category as tobacco and asbestos” is a deliberate, cynical manipulation of the facts. It is designed to make the reader believe that drinking a glass of wine carries the same lethal risk profile as inhaling the combusted asbestos fibers from a 1950s shipyard. It doesn’t. Not even close. But the anti-alcohol lobby knows that explaining the difference between “hazard identification” and “absolute risk” doesn’t scare politicians into raising taxes let alone launc a program to stigmatize alcohol. So, they trot out the asbestos line and hope nobody looks too closely.

A WAR ON JOY
Perhaps the most revealing part of the entire article is Fenske’s utter disdain for the human and social element of drinking that has sustained the practice for millennia. She notes that federal guidelines recently omitted explicit discussion of alcohol’s links to cancer, and then complains:

“The current administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services characterized alcohol as a ‘social lubricant’ that brings people together, rather than emphasizing its well-established health risks. This may be true physiologically, at least temporarily, but obscures the fact that relying on it as a social lubricant can lead to chemical and psychological dependency. In my view, statements to that effect are shortsighted...”

Heaven forbid a government official acknowledges human nature and the reality of thousands of years of human culture.

Dr. Fense appears to be truly irritated by the concept of a “social lubricant.” To the neo-prohibitionist, the idea that a substance might bring people together, ease the traumas of a long day, foster conversation, and act as the centerpiece of a communal meal is completely irrelevant to her. Instead, the joy of a shared bottle of wine isn’t a cultural good; it is merely a sneaky trap door leading straight to chemical dependency.

This is where her mask slips. This isn’t just about public health; it’s a puritanical war on pleasure. She and her fellow travelers cannot abide the fact that millions of people safely derive joy, relaxation, and cultural connection from a substance they have decided is inherently evil.

THE FALSE TOBACCO PARALLEL
Fenske’s ultimate goal is laid bare in her conclusion. She wants to run the tobacco playbook on the wine industry:

“Looking back at the history of tobacco smoking provides some helpful insights... Together, these efforts transformed smoking from a widely accepted social behavior into one broadly recognized as a major health risk and correspondingly, less socially accepted.”

Here it is. Here is the grift. They want to stigmatize wine exactly like they stigmatized cigarettes. But this ignores the fundamental reason why smoking became a cultural pariah: secondhand smoke.

Smoking wasn’t pushed out of restaurants and airplanes just because it was bad for the smoker. It was stigmatized and banished because the smoker was forcing innocent bystanders to inhale toxic fumes. The stigma was rooted in the violation of other people’s bodily autonomy.

There is no such thing as secondhand drinking. A couple splitting a bottle of Chardonnay at the table next to you is not passively destroying your liver. (Though, I urge you to google “second hand drinking”. They think it exists)

Yes, drunk driving harms innocent people. But as a society, we already heavily stigmatize and criminalize drunk driving. What Dr. Fenskie is advocating for here is the stigmatization of the product itself and the moderate consumer. They want you to feel the same social shame for buying a bottle of Cabernet at the grocery store that you would feel lighting up a Marlboro Red in a crowded kindergarten (I don’t recommend it) classroom. It is an absurd, unhinged comparison.

WHY THE LA TIMES PEDDLES THIS HYSTERICAL PANIC MONGERING
Which brings me to the ultimate question: Why do major media outlets like the LA Times and the New York Times continue to publish this nonsense?

The answer is simple: Sensationalism sells.

We live in an attention economy that rewards the destruction of the status quo. A headline that reads “A Glass of Wine with Dinner is Fine for the Vast Majority of Healthy Adults” generates zero outrage, zero clicks, and zero shares on social media. (Though we may be getting to the point where such a headline would be considered just transgressive enough to generate clicks) But a headline that screams “Your Wine Habit is Exactly Like Smoking Asbestos” is clickbait gold.

The media ecosystem has realized that “expert” medical opinions advocating for radical, puritanical shifts in social behavior drive massive engagement. They don’t care if the premise is built on the skewed perspective of an addiction ward or the deliberate misrepresentation of WHO classifications. They only care about the clicks.

For the wine, beer, and spirits trade, the publication of this article should be a blaring wake-up call. We are facing a highly organized, ideologically driven movement that has unfettered access to the editorial pages of the nation’s biggest newspapers. If we continue to sit back and quietly hope that commonsense will prevail, we are going to lose.

Now, go smoke your asbestos and have a glass of Chard if you got it.

Tom Wark also publishes