With permission of writer...

________________________________________
From: Dan Malleck <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, December 4, 2022 9:21 AM
To: Dennis Raphael
Subject: Booze and risk

Dear Dennis (If I may)
We met years ago at a conference but I don’t expect you to remember me. I was a junior colleague and teaching things like community capacity strengthening and the work of John McKnight. I am by training an historian of alcohol and drugs however.

Val Michaelson forwarded your letter to the editor (posted I understand on your listserv) about alcohol, cancer, and relative risk. I was quite happy to read it.  I have been on a sustained campaign to challenge the dominant problem based narrative around alcohol pushed out by groups such as the CCSA.  I find their work heavily distorted and based upon a moral paradigm and have been doing everything I can (or have time to) in order to offer some moderationist (such as informing people that the report was not based upon 6000 research papers as they claim but 16, after they excluded most of the research on alcohol as not “rigorous” enough.

In my work on nineteenth and twentieth century liquor and drug regulation I have seen such zealousness in the temperance movement and am disheartened to read researchers reiterating it and worse the media taking it as unvarnished truth.

So I wanted to write to thank you for writing (and circulating) that letter.  There is so much distortion in the research on alcohol dangers and so little funding for research on benefits or at least counter narratives.  I am currently writing a response to the CCSA’s policy brief and am glad to see that I’m not alone in my frustration with how such information, designed to avoid harms, can itself cause harm.  It’s Illich’s specific counterproductivity in action.

Cheers

Dan

Dan Malleck
Professor, Health Sciences
Director, Centre for Canadian Studies
Brock University
Please note: In the pursuit of work life balance, I do not normally reply to email on evenings and weekends.  You may have to wait and that is ok.
I encourage you to adopt a similar strategy.
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Dear editor:

Your December 3, 2022, editorial warning about alcohol propagates the myth that alcohol is a profound threat to health through its causing cancer. Recents story on CBC television had numerous women with breast cancer lamenting about how they had brought on the cancer itself by their moderate alcohol consumption. 
 I looked into the research upon which the story was based and discovered that moderate drinking increased mortality from cancer by 2%. Like many other journalists, the CBC reporter did not make a distinction between the increase in relative risk and the risk in absolute terms. Since mortality from cancer is generally rather low, any increase in relative terms appears to be very significant. In absolute terms, however, consumption of alcohol is a very minor contributor to cancer. It is about time that journalist begin to take seriously the ethics of reporting and making the distinction between relative and absolute risk.

Sincerely,

Dennis Raphael. 

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