Effectiveness and Strength of Evidence of the Alcohol Industry's “Industry Actions to Reduce Harmful Drinking”

Introduction: In October, 2012, the International Center for Alcohol Policies posted a web-based compendium of 3551 initiatives, representing the efforts of approximately 100 alcohol companies/ organizations to reduce the harmful use of alcohol worldwide.  The purpose of this presentation is to describe the results of a systematic content analysis of the types of activities, their likely impact (e.g. potential for harm), and their utilitarian functions.  Methods: Three public health professionals with expertise in alcohol control policy rated a stratified sample of 215 industry initiatives.  The sample was stratified into five groups of countries ranging from low-income to high-income countries.  Results: Only 7.5% could be considered “evidence-based” activities likely to have a positive impact on drinking behavior or alcohol-related problems; 39.5% were considered to have the potential to promote a brand or product.  More than half (52.0%) of all actions implemented in low and lower-middle income countries were found to have some risk of harm.  The population reach of the majority (55.8%) of initiatives was found to be “small.” Almost all actions lacked a systematic evaluation to provide evidence of effectiveness. Conclusion: Based on this assessment, it is suggested that the ‘Industry Actions’ are overwhelmingly based on approaches of unknown/ minimal effectiveness, or which have been shown to be ineffective through systematic scientific research.  Moreover, the initiatives only rarely include practices considered by WHO and the public health community to have good evidence of effectiveness, and few have been evaluated in low- and middle-income countries where they are now being disseminated.