Temperance redux

Why can’t they just leave us alone?

*Originally posted on LinkedIn April 2026*

Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about alcohol research that emphasizes harms and minimizes benefits. The more I read, the more familiar it began to feel.

As a historian, I realized I was reading a repackaging of the Victorian temperance movement.

It took a while to realize what that meant. At first I engaged with the research in the way it is intended: looking at data, assessing methods, and challenging the arguments on their terms.

But in my field, we think in terms of context; we attempt to reconstruct and understand what was happening in the past. And we look at the activities of all involved in generating new knowledge. To do that we pay attention to narrative. We ask: what’s the story?

It occurred to me that much alcohol research is advancing a narrative which is clever and subtle, but also misleading in notable ways.

Consider the consistent talking points and arguments emerging from some major players. We see them in the US Surgeon General’s advisory on cancer labels on booze; the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA’s) 2023 “Low risk drinking guidance”; and releases from the WHO.

They present clear, uncomplicated statements about alcohol harm, using language that lacks nuance: “no safe level,” “even moderate drinking is harmful” and (my least favourite) “harmful from the first drop.”

Drawing upon a vast body of complex and diverse research, there is the same clarity. Moral clarity.

That’s not typically how scientific investigation operates. It’s messier. Science is about investigation, disagreement, and debate. Researchers build on and challenge each other’s work, tweak methods, re-run experiments, generate new data, challenge existing paradigms, revise theories… It is dynamic, organic, complex and rarely lands at the same conclusions.

(This is, to be clear, the nature of all scholarship, which frustrates some people who look for easy answers).

So along with examining the challenges of the data, we need to think about the way that this evidence is being presented.

So: what’s the story here? I have thoughts (see my next posts)