In a report released Monday, the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction said any level of alcohol consumption had a net negative impact on health for almost every disease examined, including several types of cancer, heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver. The health risks become “increasingly high” when someone drinks six or more drinks a week. And for women who consume three or more drinks a week, the risk of health problems increases more steeply than men, according to research. Previous guidelines suggested low-risk drinking limits of 15 drinks per week for men and 10 for women. Dr. Robert Strang is on the reviewing executive committee Canada’s Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines. He has also been a member of the National Alcohol Strategy Advisory Committee since 2009. He spoke with host Jeff Douglas about the proposed guidelines on Friday. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. These new guidelines are a significant drop, which is upsetting for many people. It’s certainly a change, but I think, as the report describes, this is really what the latest science says, and the whole intent of this report is, what we know about a whole range of health risks from drinking alcohol and what we should what do we do then to make sure Canadians have that information and can use it and support them in the choices they make? But ultimately, how does that information then begin to inform various policy decisions about how we create environments that will support people in those choices? How do these new guidelines intersect with what we know about our alcohol habits in Nova Scotia? [The centre] In fact, for me, it’s given me an opportunity to really strengthen our work both in terms of engaging Nova Scotians and in terms of policy discussions. We have a long history and are known to have high rates of binge drinking in Nova Scotia. This study basically just really reinforces that this type of drinking has a huge impact on our collective health, it has a huge cost to our health care, criminal justice and education systems, so for me it’s an opportunity to talk about, ‘We’re OK with this;” How do we make that change and improve health by reducing the impact of all these systems, and then how do we do that? Both educating and supporting people, but also what are the policy discussions that will help support people who consume alcohol in a much safer way. Do we have data here in Nova Scotia quantifying the burden of alcohol consumption on the health care system? There has been some work done on this in various provinces, but the data in front of me from the report speaks to national data. The collective national health care cost of alcohol is $5.4 billion annually. Alcohol use is the main driver of ill health and the main driver of cost, whether from acute effects — the increased risk of violence and injury — or some of the long-term effects — cancer, heart disease, etc. And the implications are also on mental health to be discussed. LISTEN | Listen to the entire conversation: Mainstreet NS10:09Dr. Robert Strang on the new drinking guidelines Nova Scotia’s chief medical officer of health says people need to be aware of the risks associated with drinking alcohol after a national advisory body proposed new guidelines earlier this week. Host Jeff Douglas spoke with Dr. Robert Strang about the new guidelines. It has a huge cost, not only in health care but also in our criminal justice system, our community services, our education systems, and that $5.4 billion is really just a national level for the health care system alone. Where would you like to see the policy discussions around alcohol as a factor in our society go? For me, policy discussions should start with things like product labeling. We’ve had it for a long time with tobacco products. When we legalized cannabis, there was a lot of emphasis on both product labeling and point of purchase, point of use. It has stood out to me over the years that we don’t have anything like that for alcohol and the recommendations in the report are clear on that. We must have product labeling. If we say low-risk drinking is two or fewer typical drinks per week, it’s important to have how many typical drinks are in a bottle of wine. But also health warnings, cancer risk and other things like we have on both cannabis and tobacco products and some other nutritional information. That should be the first thing we talk about and usually that labeling is done with tobacco and cannabis at the federal level. That’s really their jurisdiction. This should be the first policy discussion fueled by this in terms of how we give people more information about products as they actually use them. Several years ago, there was a pilot program in the Yukon to put warning labels on alcohol like you describe. I understand the pilot never got off the ground due to lobbying by spirits producers. In the national alcohol strategy, what kind of market does the industry have? The alcohol industry used to have a seat directly at this advisory community table and no longer does. In fact, the national alcohol strategy is led by the Canadian Center on Substance Abuse. They are supported by Health Canada and so a decision was made and the decision to restructure was ultimately supported by Health Canada because since I’ve been there, having the industry at the table as it doesn’t work because they get information learn to sit at a health table and use it with many ways in closed rooms by going around procedures, exerting pressure and exerting their enormous influence on elected officials. Previous guidelines suggested low-risk drinking limits of 15 drinks per week for men and 10 for women. (CBC) So they basically stopped and the project you talked about I know. This is a great example. They actually used their influence to stop this important research on the impact of labeling and the study was able to be carried out in a limited way and the limited time of the results showed a significant impact. The alcohol industry is not going to be happy about this, but this is a consumer product, so my position would be that Canadians, Nova Scotians, deserve to have accurate information about the dangers of a product. We’re not telling them they can’t use it, but you should have accurate information about it to help you make your choices about how to use this product.
