Thoughts about drink, risk, evidence, and culture.
On this page I will discuss a range of things relating to the subtitle above. I call it distillations because I will try to keep it short – – although honestly that is something I find very difficult and let’s be clear, sometimes things need more discussion than the sound bites and simplistic interpretations we often see coming from anti-alcohol advocates who have an agenda and not much time for nuance.
I guess I could’ve called it something related to brewing since the first step towards distilling is mashing grain and fermenting it. But “fermentations” sounded a little weird. Like I was going to explode.
I will post some of the comments I have put on LinkedIn and some that I included in another blog called Drink History Canada. So if you’ve seen this somewhere else it’s probably from one of those sites.
Cheers
- Representing risk in different ways: Number Needed to HarmAs 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… Read more: Representing risk in different ways: Number Needed to Harm
- How results can be massaged to reiterate harm(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… Read more: How results can be massaged to reiterate harm
- One drink? Let’s talk about risky behaviourIf 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… Read more: One drink? Let’s talk about risky behaviour
- Making risk meaningfulPart 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.… Read more: Making risk meaningful
- How culture scrubbing denies context and reinforces dumb stereotypesIf 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… Read more: How culture scrubbing denies context and reinforces dumb stereotypes