From 2026, containers of beer, wine and spirits sold in Ireland must by law carry a label in red capital letters with two warnings: “THERE IS A DIRECT LINK BETWEEN ALCOHOL AND FATAL CANCERS” and “DRINKING ALCOHOL CAUSES LIVER DISEASES ”.
The law, signed last year, is backed by decades of scientific research and goes further than any country in communicating the health risks of alcohol. It has sparked fierce opposition from alcohol companies around the world, but it is also inspiring a push in other countries to implement similar measures.
“People who drink should have the right to know basic information about alcohol, just as they do about other foods and beverages,” said Timothy Naimi, director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria.
In Thailand, The Government is in the final stages of drafting a regulation that requires alcohol products to carry images accompanied by warning texts as “alcoholic drinks can cause cancer,” The Bangkok Post reported.
A bill has been introduced in the Canadian Parliament to require the labels of all alcoholic beverages to communicate a “direct causal link between alcohol consumption and the development of deadly cancers.”
And Norway is developing proposals to introduce cancer warning labels. “I think it is likely that we will implement something similar” to Ireland's effort, said Ole Henrik Krat Bjorkholt, Norway's Secretary of State.
Globally, only a quarter of countries require any type of health warning on alcohol, and the mandated language is generally vague, according to a recent study.
In late 2022, a group of prominent European alcohol-exporting countries lodged formal objections to the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, arguing that Ireland's labels impeded free trade and were neither appropriate nor proportionate to the goal of reducing the harms of alcohol.
When the commission raised no objections, Antonio Tajani, Italy's Foreign Minister, described the Irish proposal as “an attack on the Mediterranean diet”.
At World Trade Organization committee meetings in June and November, trade groups and 11 alcohol-exporting countries questioned the scientific validity of Ireland's cancer warning and argued the labels would infringe on free trade.
In December, over the objections of the World Health Organization, the European Parliament approved a report that did not affirm the need for warning labels, but rather called for information on the “moderate and responsible consumption.” The report's authors repeatedly watered down language about alcohol's role in disease, limiting warnings to only “harmful” or “excessive” consumption.
Over the past 15 years, a few countries have proposed stronger warning labels, but each has faced fierce opposition, said Paula O'Brien, a law professor at the University of Melbourne. In 2010, Thailand proposed requiring a rotating set of warnings accompanied by graphic color images. But at the World Trade Organization, other countries expressed concern that the labels would limit free trade, and the measure stalled. In 2016, South Korea overcame similar objections by imposing a set of warning labels, some of which link alcohol to cancer, that alcohol makers can choose from to place on their products.
If the alcohol industry were to discourage the European Union from adopting warning labels, Ireland would no longer be in harmony with European legislation. That could ultimately form a basis for challenging the labeling requirement in the Irish courts, said Ollie Bartlett, assistant professor of law at Maynooth University in Ireland. But he said such efforts are unlikely to prevail because Ireland's warning labels are “proportionate to the objective of protecting public health.”
Gauden Galea, a strategic advisor at the World Health Organization, said his hope is that, over time, “people will not remember the time when a warning about pesticides was needed, but an unlabeled carcinogen could be sold with impunity.” like alcohol.”
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