By Jeremy Appel, Passage Newsletter, January 10, 2022
It’s not widely known that alcohol has been classified as a level one carcinogen, the same category as tobacco or abestos, by the International Agency for Research on Cancer for decades, and a group of scientists say the public has a right to know.
- Tim Stockwell, a senior scientist with the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria, said: “Even drinking one drink a day increases your risk of some cancers — including, if you’re a woman, breast cancer — but also cancers of the digestive system, the mouth, stomach.”
The more you drink, the more at-risk you are, he added.
- According to the Canadian Institute for Substance Abuse Research, only 25 per cent of Canadians know about alcohol’s carcinogenic qualities.
CBC News notes: “Soaring alcohol sales since the start of the pandemic have triggered concerns of an impending global increase in related cancer cases. Experts say the risk has always been there, but is easy to ignore because drinking is so normalized and so celebrated as a form of relaxation and reward.”
- Dr. Fawaad Iqbal, a radiation oncologist at the Durham Regional Cancer Centre in Oshawa, Ont., said claims that moderate alcohol consumption has cardiovascular health benefits have been mostly debunked, but even if they were true wouldn’t outweigh the carcinogenic risks.
Iqbal wrote to the Canadian Medical Association, asking it to advocate for warning labels on booze bottles informing consumers about cancer risks.
- He told the CBC: “It’s shocking. In an information era, we have warning labels on everything I can think of. I bought my kids fishing rods this summer, and their fishing rods have warning labels that say this fishing rod can cause cancer. Whereas, you know, a level-one carcinogen that is everywhere has no particular warnings on it.”
In 2017, the Yukon experimented with cancer warning labels on alcohol, but they were removed after three weeks under pressure from the alcohol industry, which is worth $1.5 trillion globally, although warnings about recommended serving sizes remained.
- Last year, author and journalist James Wilt wrote in Passage of the need to hold the alcohol industry to account for the myriad public health dangers of their product. “By failing to specifically confront the escalating power and profit motive of the alcohol industry, the material source of these harms are left untouched,” he wrote.
Read the full CBC News piece here.