Distillations blog archive

As I argued in an earlier post, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction’s 2023 “Low Risk Drinking Guidance” used a Years of Life Lost (YLL) calculation to determine what is a low, moderate, and high risk, but YLL makes no sense for individual risk calculation. Moreover, saying “more than two drinks per week…

(posted on LinkedIn 28 Aug 2026) If you’re interested in 1) research on cancer and alcohol and 2) an example of how researchers tend to skew their results to emphasize harms, go no further than a recent article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, published May 2026 (Pinheiro et al “Reevaluating the Alcohol-Cancer Link:L…

If you gird yourself to read the actual data presented by anti-alcohol–*ahem*–I mean alcohol researchers you may be wondering how in the world they can offer information about the risks of one drink per week. Consider this table from the CCSA 2023 guidance document: As you will notice, there is data suggesting that one drink…

Part 1: The misrepresentation of individual risk In November 1986, public health officials met in Ottawa and developed the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. This shifted the priorities of public health to include the idea that public health should be informing citizens of risks in order to help them make informed decisions about their behaviour.…

If you remove something as complex as consuming alcoholic beverages from its cultural context, the knock-on effects are remarkable. Consider the fact, recognized broadly even by some of the most ardent advocates of the population health epidemiological approach to distorting health effects of drink, that people of higher incomes tend to have better health outcomes…

Data scientists often engage in a process called data scrubbing, or ” cleaning” the data. It’s not nefarious, it is just the way to ensure that the data they are using is the most reliable and analyzable data available. Although the decisions on data scrubbing are based upon researchers’ ideas of what kind of data…

Aka: The horror. The horror *Originally posted on Linked in May 2026* I’ve been thinking a lot about the dominant narratives coming out of alcohol research that uses population-level data and the advocates who amplify it. A subtle but dominant undercurrent reiterates a link between pleasure and risk. This has deep cultural manifestations: -Hansel and…

*Originally posted to LinkedIn May 2026* In a recent JAMA Network article reassessing evidence of alcohol harm over time, the authors concluded that there was no significant benefit to moderate drinking; they effectively eliminated the J-curve. One reason the J-curve disappears is that the researchers treated self-reported abstainers as unreliable and removed them from the…

*Originally posted to LinkedIn April 2026* As a historian, it’s my job to think about what story the evidence tells us: who is doing what, and why. I approach current alcohol research in much the same way. Consider, for example, the CCSA’s low risk alcohol guidance. We see a narrative designed to lead readers in…

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…