Response to Letter to the Editor by George F. Koob (2023)

Citation

Mitchell G (2023) Response to Letter to the Editor by George F. Koob (2023). Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 84 (2), pp. 348-348. https://doi.org/10.15288/jsad.23-00091

Abstract
First paragraph: Dear Editor, I appreciate Dr. Koob's (2023) willingness to respond to our article (Mitchell & McCambridge, 2023) and would like to respond to his comments on National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) interactions with stakeholders in the context of the Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health (MACH) trial. The alcohol industry has a significant conflict of interest in relation to public health. This is because it makes a large proportion of its profits from sales to heavy drinkers, who experience a large proportion of the harm (Babor, 2023; Maani & Lauber, 2023). It is unclear why this conflict of interest and the scientific literature underpinning it have not shaped or informed NIAAA's engagement practices. For example, as we report in the article, an NIAAA senior leader introduced and endorsed a Heineken corporate social responsibility leader to a National Association for Children of Alcoholics representative, which is one of the groups Koob lists among the organizations NIAAA interacts with. We also report that the Friends of NIAAA, which Koob references, lists the industry-funded “social aspects” organization, the Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility (FAAR), as a member, and that the two groups co-organized an NIAAA event in March 2018. It is precisely this apparent treatment of the alcohol industry as just one of many stakeholders the NIAAA interacts with that is problematic.

Journal
Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs: Volume 84, Issue 2

People

Dr Gemma Mitchell

ISMH Hastings Research Fellow, Institute for Social Marketing