This is an uncorrected AI transcript for guidance purposes only
Grant Ennis: I’m gonna talk today mainly about my book and the research behind it in how corporations use disinformation to undermine political will for a very effective public health and environmental policy. I am not an alcohol expert. I’m trying to build on the work of other experts that are here, but a lot of the ways that industry uses narratives are the same regardless of the public health issue.
Grant Ennis: And a lot of the underlying ideological or financial capture issues that exist between corporations, public health organizations, and research institutions are quite the same regardless of which industry or which health issue we’re talking about. I’m eager to answer any questions along the way as I’m presenting. we’ll leave it to Phil and Andy to see how we want to make that happen. if it should be on video questions or just from the comments, but I won’t be able to see your comments in the chat while I’m presenting because I have the full screen in front of me. so please beep me if you have a question or want to interrupt me. So I love this quote. Some of you may have heard you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what for sure that just ain’t so. Many of that Mark Twain said this.
Grant Ennis: The best thing about this Mark Twain quote, I think, is actually that Mark Twain never said it. f further underscoring how great this quote is. I’m going to use it a couple of times in the presentation today. I think it’s important to start with this, especially given the level of capture globally the public health community has had forever. I mean on Mark, this is one of your and Nason and May’s papers here on the left. And then this is a screenshot of who Drinkaware was funding just a few years ago. I think the screenshot from 2020 or funded by. So you have these NOS’s that are ostensively working to the public benefit that are clearly captured by industry and it essentially Drinkaware is essentially an industry organization.
Grant Ennis: but that’s really kind of the tip of the iceberg for the direct capture that if you look at just across the board the universities around the world that are funded by the alcohol industry. I mean this is just a quick snapshot. it’s hard to find universities that aren’t find it funded by industry is more to the point. So our entire research community not even looking at alcohol is tainted. We have all been influenced and surrounded by people that have been influenced by the alcohol industry. And a lot of the stuff that we take as axiom or that we take to just fundamentally be true has been largely shaped by industry without us even knowing it.
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Grant Ennis: So, I think it’s really important to be willing to question the things that we see as sacred cows because we might actually be believing things that are harmful to the goals that we ostensibly seek to achieve. The United Nations similarly works very closely and has worked very closely for a very long time with alcohol industry and other industries. this then further shapes the way we globally think about alcohol. What we don’t talk about, what we don’t say, the things that are just not on the table. and then the way that each issue and the solutions to our issues are defined are being highly in influenced by industry. NOS’s all around us are being funded by alcohol industry.
Grant Ennis: again further shaping and surrounding us with industry narratives in places where we would least expect it. and to such an extent that I think we just don’t understand deeply enough the level to which we are captured. So we really need to go back and look at what we know for sure that just ain’t so. And I’m going to cover a lot of that today. Some of it some people might be surprised by some people have heard it from me before if you’ve met me or heard some of my presentations read my book Dark PR but please feel free to challenge me along the way if you would like.
Grant Ennis: in terms of capture just to kind of recap, funding of course is one form of capture. and funding different actors through different layers of front groups is very commonly known. There’s another kind of capture that I think is very important is the people and organizations and institutions that actually aren’t taking money from industry but because everybody else is we have adopted their ideas without being realizing I call it environmental capture. Sometimes this is called the creeping colonialization of ideas or cultural capture.
Grant Ennis: whatever you want to call it. It’s a big problem that I don’t think we recognize enough. We can be captured ideologically without ever ourselves having to have been funded or directly influenced by industry. the way around this of course in terms of the direct capture is to make sure we never take money from industry in any way. self-funded member-ledd organizations are best but this still doesn’t solve the problem of environmental capture. I also want to start instead of looking at solutions to alcohol harm from an additive standpoint. I think we need to take a step back and realize that a lot of subtractive solutions would probably be more appropriate. It’s not that the system is broken that but that we’ve built it this way.
Grant Ennis: For example, rather than thinking of the nanny state being something that we would look to solve our problems and it’s like intruding on our lives, the nanny is actively killing us right now. The government is subsidizing alcohol. so a lot of the policies that we have in place are actually incentivizing ill health. so we could do a lot just by getting rid of the policies on the books that are actively harming us. That’s not the case across the board for everything. in some cases taxes and other things for harmful industries would be good. But I think that when we take into account the polluter pays principle, we would recognize is that taxes in fact in some ways are just offsets to implicit subsidies. And they’re not really nannyate subsidies.
Grant Ennis: they’re more so offsets to an existing nanny state that is actively harming the public interest. Here’s another health issue that’s actively subsidized. This is Australian example. So Australian according to a calculation I did with a colleague of mine or a friend of mine some years back we found that Australia subsidizes process ultrarocessed food manufacturers 5 billion per year. we looked at what they should have paid in taxes and then what they did paid in taxes after all of the deductions that they were given.
Grant Ennis: quite shocking to see these numbers and you could do similar kinds of calculations around in other countries if you have the data available of course if you look at fossil fuel subsidies for example the globally government subsidized fossil fuels 7 trillion per year. So, a lot of these health issues could be addressed by removing these subsidies. And if you look, you see here is a diagram showing diabetes incidents over time and the price of sugar dramatically collapsing over time. When you subsidize goods like sugar or ultrarocessed foods or alcohol or fossil fuels or driving, you make them cheaper. You make all of these harmful products cheaper.
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Grant Ennis: people use more of them and then you have more disease incidents or health harms. So again, we live on a nanny state planet and the nanny is killing us. I think it’s a very helpful way of framing a lot of these problems rather than thinking of them as something that we need additive solutions to. Then I wanted to quickly touch on what we know works for solving health problems. We know that taxes on things that are harmful make people use less of them. Removing subsidies makes people use less of them. changing the proximity of things to us makes people use less of them. If we make things further away, for example, alcohol-free zones would be an example for alcohol or sometimes called dry zones. or we by modifying the temporality of our policies.
Grant Ennis: So making it illegal for people under 21 to drink alcohol or making it illegal to sell or buy alcohol on Sundays after five you name it. These policies really work. An industry works very hard to shift debates so that we don’t talk about these policies and they stay off the agenda. The way that they do that is by framing debates. they work to make sure that we just keep a focus and a dis discourse on other things because if we’re focused on other things, we’re not focused on what matters. Politics is zero sum. by having attention on one thing, you have less attention on other things.
Grant Ennis: And that’s something very difficult for a lot of people to keep in mind that political will is not something that allows us to do both to do things that are ineffective and to do things that are effective or to use narratives that are ineffective combined with those that are effective. And I’m going to talk a lot about that today. But the core of all of this is this kind of political will pie chart here. this zero someum pie chart of political will. framing by industry helps to make sure that we have less attention on what really matters. you’re all kind of familiar with PR and framing, I’m sure. this is a pretty good example of it.
Grant Ennis: If you look and try and figure out the number of the parking spot, just take a second to look at this diagram and guess the number where the car is. What’s underneath the car? I’ll give you a couple seconds to play with this in your head. What if I frame the question a little differently, though? I think for everybody now looking at this, it’s a lot more Small changes to the way we visualize diagrams, to the way we use words and present information lead to dramatically different levels of understanding and political support. here’s two different framing techniques for advertising a piece of property. Is it a small room? Is a cozy room?
Grant Ennis: more common ones are pro-life in discussions about abortion, minimum wage laws versus what industry likes to call the right to work laws, which is getting rid of minimum wages, health policy versus nanny state, etc. These are small differences in framing that make a really big difference. and then the way we get people to believe a given frame or not believe a different given frame is how many times they’ve heard it. it doesn’t really matter how accurate the frame the information is so much as the level of exposure. If we inundate a population with information, true or false, they’ll be more likely to believe it, which is quite terrifying.
Grant Ennis: and I should take a moment at least to explain the way this is now happening in the information age. bot farms are one of the most common ways that advertisers and malicious actors can spread and amplify framing. So, here’s an example of what a bot farm looks like. So that’s a series of cell phones. I’ve got echo. Can somebody mute their Thank you very much.
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Grant Ennis: Those bot farms are a series of cell phones that are all connected to central computers where the computers will manage thousands and thousands of Twitter or Blue Sky or Facebook accounts to retweet or amplify given narratives. I’m about to show you an interview with a former Bot Farm operator explaining…
Grant Ennis: how this works.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: I’m a former tech employee,…
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: created and sustained a bot farm between 2015 and 2018. Give you guys some information because American bot farm operators are pretty rare. Most bot farms operate overseas. I don’t know if there’s anyone like me in the US that can tell you this stuff is all I’m saying. Typically way more secretive about this, but it’s gotten so bad I need to talk about it. So, what is a bot farm? something that a company or an individual purchases. You get a set amount of bots that normal people go out and spread your message. Here’s the work that goes into that. as the operator have to create each individual fake person. I have to create a picture, a username, a real name. Then I have erate Has to be supportive of the message that the client is paying for. Positive opinion of the company or the individual. If anyone has ever tried to create content, that takes time and it also takes ideas. It’s not easy.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: Finally, you need to program those bots based on activity. Bots respond to what you do. You think that you going around and liking things is invisible. It’s not. You’re leaving a footprint across the app. That footprint is tracked by people like me. So, based on what other people like or comment on, I program my bot to go and search for those people, find them, and then interact with them with my content that supports the message that I’ve created. This programming also includes research to find the people that are the most susceptible to believing the message that you’re selling and targeting those people. This is just a scratch on the surface of what it takes to program one of these and people are buying hundreds of them. Now, here’s the interesting part. The software to run all those bots is not free and the time that it takes to create all the things that I just told you about also not free. All of this stuff costs money and it represents money when you see it.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: If you’re seeing non-stop videos posted with a certain agenda,…
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: someone’s paying for that. So when you see a dump a ton of media that’s telling you all the same message, do not say, “Wow, what a thing happening right now.” Please instead say, “Wow, who’s trying to buy my opinion on this topic?
Grant Ennis: and that’s very important who’s paying discussion.
Grant Ennis: Many people think disinformation is an issue of what I call the viral theoretical model of disinformation where it’s like people spreading it. Sometimes I’ll call the idiot uncle model where it’s like our uncle that lives in a very rural area. It’s on the computer way too much and they just keep sharing, toxic misinformation. That’s really not what’s happening.
Grant Ennis: It’s really not what’s happening. You’re having millions and billions of euros and pounds and dollars spent to amplify disinformation. This downstream understanding of disinformation where we can just educate our way out of it by teaching people to be more resilient of disinformation won’t work because fundamentally what matters is the quantity of exposure. it’s not how smart the individual is that really matters. it’s how much exposure they have to the message. and we need to be going upstream and ending this amplification of disinformation. And just quickly, this is really not an issue about convincing everybody. When I’m talking about these narratives today, we’re not talking about convincing the whole world of these sometimes rather ridiculous ideas.
Grant Ennis: you really only need to convince a small margin of a given population in order to sway a very large election be it a referendum or what you name it or to sway political support for a policy. So if there’s an alcohol tax or minimum unit pricing or something, if you see on the screen in front of you, you’ve got all these elections and you can see very small margins and all of them were these elections have a lot of documented disinformation around them. So you got to wonder were they thrown by disinformation campaigns? It’s quite possible.
Grant Ennis: So I’m now going to talk about the framework the cross industry playbook as I’ve documented In my book I cover in dark PR I cover the automobile road crashes and the road industry the toxic food environment, diabetes, obese overweight and obesity and the sugar industry. and then the global warming and the fossil fuel industry and I demonstrate that they use the same playbook of nine devious frames and this playbook can be applied to any industry and issue. So I’m going to go over some of the issues I covered in my book and I’m also going to talk a little bit about the way the alcohol industry uses these narratives as well.
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Grant Ennis: I’d love to know if you think that my adaptation of this to the alcohol industry and alcohol harm is accurate or if you think I should use a different example. So, if you have any thoughts on the way I present this information, I’d be glad to know it because I think many of you are alcohol experts are far more wellversed in this than me. So, the first is deniialism. I think this is a very important frame of course but we spend way too much time on it. we know that industry denies that their pro products are harful. Of course tobacco industry famously did this but other industries do the same. Alcohol industry downplays cancer risk. When we talk about industry disinformation it tends to stop the year and that’s really too bad. this is really just scratching the surface of disinformation. We need to go much deeper.
Grant Ennis: Next is what I call post deniialism. Post-di on the Overton window on…
Grant Ennis: what we think is acceptable and what we think is true around us. so I’ll show an example from the fossil fuel industry in Australia which is quite striking.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: This can provide endless possibilities.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: It can create light and jobs, delivering $6 billion in wages for Australians. It produces steel and powers our homes as well as our economy,…
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: injecting $40 billion each year. And it can now reduce its emissions by up to 40%. It’s coal. Isn’t it amazing what this little black rock can do? Authorized G. Evans, CRA.
Grant Ennis: That’s the Australian Coal Association or…
Grant Ennis: something to that effect that sponsored that. this is the plastic
Grant Ennis’s Presentation:
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: This can Presenting the possibilities of Plastics help save you from dents and broken bones. They help save Thin light plastics, fewer trucks, less gas. They help save you from being scrambled. They help food stay fresher. Brussels sprouts. Plastics can even help save toddlers from trouble.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: And this vest helped save my dad’s life. Plastics make it possible.
Grant Ennis: So famously industry said Guinness is good for you.
Grant Ennis: Cigarettes will help you live longer and that sugar will help you lose weight. alcohol industry famously said that small amounts of red wine can make you live longer. they tobacco industry famously did this campaign under Edward Bernese called torches of freedom where they marketed cigarettes as something that were liberating for women. They paid for all these actresses to do fake protests and smoke cigarettes.
Grant Ennis: And they did, I don’t know if you all remember, but I remember this very strikingly that some years back the alcohol industry started trying to convince the feminist community that it was a liberatory act to drink alcohol while pregnant because there was no evidence to actually definitively say alcohol was harmful to the fetus. which is dramatically shameful that they were doing that. But they’re basically saying alcohol is part of women’s liberation. This is please correct me if anybody thinks I’ve got that a little bit wrong. This is me operating from memory. You all are the experts on this subject.
Grant Ennis: But across the board, we have a lot of documented cases of alcohol being framed as something beneficial either to society, to social justice or to health itself, which we now know pretty clearly is nonsense. the industry also likes to normalize debates. This framing of normalization is common across all issues with harmful industries. So industry funds the fat acceptance movement for example. the automobile lobby has long called car crashes accidents to normalize them. We know that the fossil fuel industry has promoted the term climate change over global warming in order to normalize global warming and make it seem less scary.
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Grant Ennis: and that all of these terms when they get message tested lead to less political support for meaningful policy interventions. this normalization framing really works to reduce political will. In the case of alcohol, you see this kind of normalization all the time. There’s this quote here on the bottom by the distinguished Shayla who’s here on the call with us. noting how alcohol industry likes to normalize drinking pairing it with sports. you see this in research from Mark who’s also on the line with us today. and across the board industry tries to frame drinking and especially moderate drinking as normal as part of everyday life.
Grant Ennis: natural, historical, something humans have always done. because why would you regulate something that’s natural and normal? the remaining six frames are all in one way or another pseudo solution frames or false solutions. And so this is where we get into you can’t be doing both in terms of framing and political will. The more people believe even slightly in false solutions, the less they support the really powerful stuff. You can’ We can’t be doing both. And I’ll explain that more in depth as we go along. I call the civil rumoring frame. This is an industry framing where they promote something that boomerangs back in some kind of harmful way.
Grant Ennis: so the more you make devices energy efficient for example the more people use them. So industry loves to promote energy efficiency in the case of global warming industry loves to promote exercise for weight loss. very famously and the more we get exposed to this kind of stuff like exercise in order to lose weight the less we focus on the food environment. we get stuck on looking at the thing that doesn’t work rather than what does. and we know that the more exercise you do, the hungrier you get. so we don’t really see any gains from weight loss. We see other kinds of health gains. Exercise is great. It’s just not going to solve the overweight pandemic that we’re dealing with globally.
Grant Ennis: In the case of alcohol, I identified two things that I thought might be silver boomerangs. You all researchers in the audience that are specialists on this might have a wiser opinion than me. But one thing you see is this narrative that we should teach our kids to drink when they’re very young. I believe the evidence now shows that if you do that, you see more binge drinking later in life. So there’s this rebound when you teach kids to drink when they’re very young that they then end up drinking too much. Possibly also is this argument that you should hydrate while you’re drinking. But I also suspect that probably leads to people drinking more.
Grant Ennis: I’ll leave this one to the wisdom of the crowds if anybody wants to leave some good ideas in the comments. but this silver boomerang framing for alcohol, for diabetes, for road safety, for global warming, it’s pervasive. We see it all the time. The next frame in the stevia frame playbook is the magic frame. So, autonomous cars will save us from the road death. pandemic globally or carbon capture storage is going to solve us from global warming or that diabetes can sol be solved with genetic cures and genetics I really see as the magic frame for alcohol. This idea that alcohol abuse is an issue of genetics.
Grant Ennis: but we know in the case of diabetes for example that it’s not genetic. I talk about this at length in my book. This is a little bit touchy u in some sectors. U but you don’t have these kinds of skyrocketing rates of change being associated with genetic change. Humans are not fundamentally genetically different than they were 100 years ago. And yet our diabetes incidence rates are skyrocketing. but the same attribution that genetics is the cause of smoking, genetics is the cause of diabetes is used over and over again by industry So here you can see Drink IQ is a website funed by Dagio perhaps Mark you would know better than I. I think it just might be a DAI website. I’m not entirely sure.
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Grant Ennis: but you see the industry promoting this idea that genetics and somehow we need a genetic cure for alcoholism and that’ll solve our issues with alcohol harm. This framing is very powerful treatment frame. This is the idea that rather than end the subsidies for alcohol or regulate alcohol, we could just treat the harms of alcohol. we can just give people more medicine or invest money in health care you name it. Industry loves to shift health problems from prevention to the treatment of them.
Grant Ennis: because the more you believe in the treatment being the solution, the less you support the policy change for prevention. and that’s pretty well documented. In the case of alcohol, you can see I mean this is just one of many examples of industry promoting healthcare infrastructure or funding hospitals or a lot of the time they fund health races like running races and…
Grant Ennis: stuff. I think you all have probably seen the alcohol industry doing this kind of thing. Oops. this is this CEO of Exxon Mobile talking about how global warming can be solved by treating it, by adapting to global warming rather than preventing it.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: Not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: It’ll have a warming impact. how is what is very hard for anyone to predict and depending on how large it is then projects how dire the consequences are. as we have looked at the most recent studies coming out in the IPCC reports which I’ve seen the drafts and I can’t say too much because they’re not out yet but when you predict things like sea level rise you get numbers all over the map. If you take what I would call a reasonable scientific approach to that we believe those consequences are manageable.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: They do require us to begin to exert or spend more policy effort on adaptation. What do you want to do if we think the future has sea level rising 4 in 6 in? Where are the impacted areas and what do you want to do to adapt to that? And as human beings, as a species, that’s why we’re all still here. We have spent our entire existence So, we will adapt to this changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around. We’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions. And so, I don’t the fear factor that people want to throw out there to say we just have to stop this. I do not accept.
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: I do believe we have to be efficient and we have to manage it but we also need to look at the other side of the engineering solution…
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: which is how are we going to adapt to it and there are solutions it’s not a problem that we can’t solve
Grant Ennis: So, here’s some of the research on the way adaptation or…
Grant Ennis: treatment framing is found to either crowd out budget for prevention or to keep political will low for prevention. we know very well that the next frame is probably the toughest one and I think the Mark Twain quote that is not a Mark Twain quote is probably most apt for this section. We’ve been captured globally like the dogooder the public health community.
Grant Ennis: We are so surrounded by industry narratives, we don’t even realize where we’ve been adopting industry arguments, individualization, individualism, sometimes called informationism, victim blaming, idealism, agency, choice, responsibilization. This frame I call in my book victim blaming. but it’s much more than that. It’s in the focus of responsibility on the individual and a lot of us don’t realize it but we continue to endorse public policy and public health interventions which are keeping the focus of responsibility on the individual but we don’t realize it and is why this is one section’s a little tough for a lot of people to get.
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Grant Ennis: if anybody would like to get a copy of my book, I can email them a PDF for all the sources. Or if you’d like to discuss things about this with me, email me at grant.nisman.edu and I can provide more information. Bill also has my email if you just want to ask him for it. reminder, these things These things change human behavior. it’s a framework I came up with in my book. But price, proximity, and temporality are the things that change the way humans behave at a population level and nothing else. And that’s a really strong argument to make. I’d be glad to be challenged on it, but I’m pretty convinced that this theoretical framework on how human behavior works is solid.
Grant Ennis: this is changing the material environment rather than the information environment which does not change human behavior such as education, persuasion campaigns, pledge drives, perform performative congruency acts, non-disclosure forms, labels, plane packaging, advertising bands. Some of these things can be very good when they don’t individualize things when they’re talking about issues at a population level. So, education exposing people to the way politics works. Persuasion campaigns encouraging people to view public health issues from a public population lens. labels which explain public health issues from a public health perspective. Plain packaging and advertising bans are both very good in taking away industries’s ability to manipulate us.
Grant Ennis: But none of these things actually changes human behavior. And that’s important because when you look at the claims that many of our colleagues and friends and industry make about these interventions, when we make claims that these interventions change behavior, normally we’re not doing it from a position of strong evidence. What we’re doing is we’re conflating knowledge, attitudes, behavioral intention, self-re purported behavior with observed behavior or worse with documented impact. And you can easily change knowledge, you can easily change attitudes, you can change behavioral intentions, you can even change self behav reported behavior.
Grant Ennis: even pie hack, you can cherrypick, you can leverage positive results bias, you can use varial complation, you conflate clinical significance with statistical significance and you can say you’ve got observed behavior or documented behavior to small amounts. But when I think most people are aware you don’t actually see real changes in documented impact of any clinical significance from informationist interventions. And I think we need to be a lot more honest about that because the underlying narrative from industry is that we don’t need to change public policy. We don’t need to change public health policy in order to solve these health crisises.
Grant Ennis: All we need to do is shift the focus onto the individual and help them to make better choices. and this framing is constantly being financed and supported by industry efforts. in terms of alcohol control, in terms of all public health issues, anything that industry makes money off of, they boost this narrative. and I think as a public health community, we need to do a better job of recognizing this is a very devious f acknowledging that it doesn’t work to change behavior.
Grant Ennis: And I think we need to more deeply understand when we message test labels, we message test campaigns for behavior change,…
Grant Ennis’s Presentation: I’m not
Grant Ennis: what we are actually doing is message Testing against public policy because when you are promoting one frame, you are reducing support for another. So when you message test for individual responsibility, getting people to intend to change their behavior, you’re getting people to believe that it’s not public policy that needs to change, it’s individuals. And we need to do a much better job of recognizing that. and this is a framing technique that’s consistently used, as I said, already by all industries, and we know it undermines political action.
Grant Ennis: That’s why industry uses it. And the evidence for why this framing is so difficult and harmful is so consistent and old over the years. More and more studies showing that it’s harmful. And yet many of our colleagues continue to embrace it. And that’s understandable because we are so surrounded by industry influence that we don’t even realize it. here’s an example from feminism. The more women are told they need to lean in in order to seek to achieve women’s liberation, the less women will support public policy that would lead to them getting equal pay.
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Grant Ennis: the more we place the less women place responsibility for women’s rights on the political system. very very scary. So when we blame the victims of the food environment for the political system, when we individualize it, people are less supportive of policy change. when we say just lose weight, eat less today. when we say the solution to the overweight pandemic is better food labels, we are keeping the responsibility for the pandemic on the label reader.
Grant Ennis: the same for the carbon footprint, which I’m going to show some more content on in a moment. the same for the harmful drinker, the alcohol abuser. When we keep the focus of responsibility for alcohol harm on the individual by focusing on narratives in our debates like we need better labels, to help people be warned and make better choices. We are undermining our efforts for policy change for things like minimum unit pricing, for alcohol tax, for dry zones, all of these other things. and we need those things. We need those policies in place and those are the policies that we should be focusing on. But industry loves it when we focus on what should be on the label instead.
Grant Ennis: Here’s some studies that show that food labels don’t lead to behavior change. We just don’t want labels message tested for individual responsibility, which by and large is what’s happening right now. Carbon labels also don’t work. I spent 20 minutes finding these studies, so I’m sure there’s even more out there, but it was pretty consistent when I was looking at the research on actual outcomes from labels on alcohol, but they didn’t end up changing behavior. You change knowledge, you change behavioral intentions, you change other stuff, but you don’t end up with any kind of actual outcomes from labels.
Grant Ennis: So, I’m not sure I don’t think we should continue to keep labels as something that we claim behavioral change for. We need to see labels as something that can lead to better support for more powerful policy action later, but we need to do two things differently. We need to stop saying that labels change behavior. and we need to stop making them the focus of all of our efforts at least as an outsider from the alcohol control community. my take is that they are pretty much the focus of our efforts to influence policy at this moment. So, here’s just a bunch of studies that I found very quickly that and…
Grant Ennis: that labels don’t change behavior. I’ll wrap up in two or…
Phil Cain: Hi. Hi.
Phil Cain: Maybe we can give it a couple more minutes and then we can move to questions because particularly this labeling thing I’m sure people want to ch on. Thank you.
Grant Ennis: three minutes. Thanks similarly with again Mark this is you and your colleagues doing great work alcohol. Am I still online? I heard a beep. Am I still here?
Grant Ennis:
Andy Mohan: Yes.
Andy Mohan: So, you’re still online. That was just someone joining in. Okay.
Grant Ennis: Okay. …
Grant Ennis: so, pledges, I promise that I will drink less. These things don’t work. similar advertising bans are great because they deprive industry of an ability to manipulate us, but they don’t lead to behavior change. and the claims that they do are really quite harmful. I’m going to skip some of the videos and carbon footprint stuff. this one is mass media campaigns. don’t change behavior. know all of these kinds of interventions could be good if they were focused on societal and public policy issues and stuff, but when you message test them for behavior change, they end up undermining our efforts.
01:05:00
Grant Ennis: this quote, usually if I had more time, I’d ask somebody in the audience to read it out. I love this tweet. I still think my favorite thing that’s ever happened to me on the internet is the time a guy said, “People change their minds when you show them facts such as labels.” And I said, “Actually, shutty though that studies show that’s not true and link two sources.” And he said, “Yeah, I still think it works.” I get that reaction quite a lot when I present this information. but if you dig and you look at the studies on informationist interventions, we consistently find zero population level material change in the public health issue we’re trying to solve. And then when you test levels of political spo support after exposure to these messages, we end up with much less support for meaningful policy change as a result of this kind of messaging. And we know very well we can’t be doing both. You can’t be doing individual framing and population framing.
Grant Ennis: you undermine yours political support for population framing. Frameworks institute sometimes also calls this splitting the frame. I cause call it multiffactorialism that I’m going to talk about really quickly as I wrap up in a moment. last two frames knotted web framing sometimes called complexity. So you have industry saying that alcohol problems are complex. Mark Mark Patty Crew who’s on the line has done some really great writing on this as well as some of his Natalie Savona if I’m remembering the name right great great work this is Drinkawa again this is Dio and all the other alcohol industry actors saying alcohol harm is complex so circular so knotted so weblike that it’s impossible to take action on.
Grant Ennis: we know that framing undermines strong political action. Road safety Climate change is complex according to Chevron. here’s Exxon Climate change is final frame before I wrap up because we’re running low on time Multiffactorialism is this idea for diabetes, genetics, lifestyle and exercise are the necessary combination of solutions to solve the problem. in alcohol maybe it’s alcohol harm is the result of a complex multiffactorial interaction between genes, lifestyle, and policy or something. It’s this idea that it’s not one thing. the source of the problem is really multiffactorial.
Grant Ennis: goes back to the tobacco industry from the 70s. This is the Roper proposal or sometimes called the Panzer memo. we know that industry uses multiffactorialism under a lot of different names in order to polit undermine political will for action. Here’s Coca-Cola saying obesity is multiffactorial. industry always does this. and we know that multiffactorialism, it’s treated as if it’s axiom in a lot of public health communities, but multiffactorialism there’s nothing special about it. it’s treated as if it was a virtue. but’s not. it distracts us and it undermines our ability to take meaningful action on the material le levers of health. I’m gonna wrap up here.
Grant Ennis: I know we’ve got a lot of discussion to Go to the last slide. Over to you, Phil.
Phil Cain: H I’ll press the right button this time. yeah, we’ve got about 10 minutes left in this half of the session, but I’m sure some of these themes will cross over into the second session with Ellis who I gather has just joined us. So, yeah, I think what I should probably do is ask somebody, maybe Peter, if you’re, available, to jump on and sort of bat for bat for labeling,…
Phil Cain: and some of the benefits I think you mentioned in the chat. If you just jump on the
Peter Rice: Yeah. Yeah.
Peter Rice: I mean, thanks, Yeah. I don’t disagree with anything that Grant said about labeling and I agree with the other points that people have made that and Grant made that labeling, can be a way to build commitment for other things. But my point was that I think it certainly is labeling issue can be a useful way to kind of open the box on why do we not have labeling why do we have nutritional information on yogurt in Europe and we don’t have it on beer we have nutritional information on free beer but not on alcoholic beer and that’s simply due to lobbying and stuff.
01:10:00
Peter Rice: So I think it can be a useful way to open that box. But if I could actually take the opportunity to ask R a very specific thing about the silver bullet framing and the reason I ask that is you went through minimum price in Scotland and a very kind of common thing from people who didn’t like the idea was to say this is not a silver bullet. Right now, the advocates never said it was a silver bullet, but when you’re in debate, how do you actually handle that? So, I’m never quite sure what a straw man argument is, if that’s a straw man argument, but I don’t know, if I’m clear what I’m getting at, how do you kind of handle that going, this isn’t a simple issue to it ties up with your complexity point, so specifically if someone,…
Peter Rice: said to you, Grant, taxation isn’t a silver bullet. How do you actually handle that in the here and now of the debate and discussion? Yeah.
Grant Ennis: Yeah.
Grant Ennis: I mean, they are man strawmaning you, aren’t they? they’re really trying to put you in a position that you weren’t making the case for. Especially because the minimum union pricing is the levels tebly high in taxation is not set so terribly high that you couldn’t buy a drink. I think in a conversation like that you’d have to pivot. I take it back a moment to subsidies and implicit incentives.
Grant Ennis: So if you calculated the cost of alcohol harm to society and then you looked at how much alcohol tax would recoup of that, you were still subsidizing alcohol. So it try and try and change the framing and get away from them. when you look at the way we’re supposed to deal with these kinds of more heated debates, you never want to repeat the framing of the opponent party. So, don’t even say, ” I’m saying it’s a silver bullet.” Don’t mention it. Just go with what you want. We’re subsidizing an alcoholic environment at the moment.
Peter Rice: Hang on. Yeah.
Grant Ennis: I mean, that’s probably not very good framing. Maybe skip the alcoholic bit, but you get the idea. stick with what you want. And then with labels, I think thank you for your comments, Peter, and totally agree as well.
Grant Ennis: I just want to repeat the important thing is to not message test for behavior change.
Phil Cain: Thanks very much, Grant. I think also Eric Carlin came in with a point, a former person. maybe you’d be able to just make your two penith
Eric Carlin: Yeah, formerly SHA with Peter as well. You’re hearing from Sha twice as well. Grant, that was a brilliant brilliant presentation. I guess I don’t end up agreeing with you and everything in all of your conclusions though. So I don’t think that necessarily people who are supporting labeling are arguing that labeling is more important than anything else. when we were looking at labeling at WHO Europe, very much we were approaching it in terms of finding out what does the evidence tell us about kind of what impact it can have rather than saying that we thought it would bring about behavior change and certainly I’ve put in the chat it does raise awareness. it rais giving people information is a consumer right?
Eric Carlin: You should actually know what’s in a product that you’re consuming that might do you Whether or not having that information diverts attention away from support for other policies, that’s where I lost you a bit in terms of your argument. I think that raising awareness of har the harms in a product for individuals, surely that would contribute to improving support for effective policies. the other thing I would say is where I get confused a bit with the discussion as well is that it’s a bit that with the silver bullet thing that Peter was talking about. I think that we’re clear that we have to have a range of policies working together and different policies will work better in different places at different times.
Eric Carlin: So when we were writing the framework for alcohol in Europe which I was the lead author on we basically had six priority areas. The first three very clearly related to the best buys you that you’re covering in your book. action on price availability and marketing but then we also had labeling health services support and that means actually supporting treatment. So actually it’s not an argument against treatment and for prevention and not treatment. but also community action and actually kind of recognizing the community is coming together over all of these areas
01:15:00
Eric Carlin: of raise public support and raise public awareness of what’s actually going to affect the structural change that shifts us away from all this individual responsibility stuff. So, I think what I’m saying overall is I agree with you with the whole gist most of what you said, but I don’t necessarily agree with all of your conclusions. it’s great to be challenged though.
Phil Cain: So, we’re coming right to the end. Maybe there’s time for one more point or one more question. If you can hit the raise hand button and maybe we can pick you up that way. anybody’s got something. Don’t know whether Sheila has mentioned a few points in the comments,…
Phil Cain: but Perfect.
Sheila Gilheany: No just to say firstly Grant an enormously entertaining useful presentation.
Sheila Gilheany: Thank you indeed. Just in relation to labeling to me it’s part and parcel of an overall package that’s needed. We know that pricing is actually the thing that is probably most helpful in terms of reducing alcohol consumption. but there is evidence that we show that when people are exposed to warning labels, say about cancer, they’re more likely to support introduction of pricing measures as a thing that’s there. And I think it probably is one of our problems is that as small NOS’s and as everybody working in this field, there are many different things we could be working on at any one time. And I know that for us that’s a massive challenge because we’re simultaneously We’re trying to get excess duties increased and also we’re trying to make sure that labeling, happens.
Sheila Gilheany: And clearly there’s an industry that benefits enormously by there being these multiple things going on at any one time. But I just put a thing in there because I did find it interesting. I was reading Heineken labeled as their number one business risk was regulation and the three regulations that they specifically drew attention to included labeling of their products. So they certainly are concerned about labeling as a thing. And I like Peter’s comment very much because it allows you to say why don’t we have labels why is this industry being allowed to get away blue murder literally on the labeling things.
Sheila Gilheany: So I think there is something there and I suppose maybe the lesson that I have to try and absorb is where’s our best buy at any one particular time and sometimes that can be from a political point of view we might just have an opening on something and we should take that and I’m never 100% sure that I’m ever doing anything correct in this…
Sheila Gilheany: because politics isn’t physics unfortunately and it’s just a bit tricky to know what is sometimes the best and…
Phil Cain: Yep. Thank you.
Sheila Gilheany: the right thing to do. So I did find your talk really really interesting and I’ll have to look back at it again too for other stuff. Thank you.
Phil Cain: Thank you very much, Sheila. I know we’ve got one more time for one more quick point before we move on to the second session. it’s Alistister McGillchrist, I think, is masquerading as Jean Leech, but
Alastair Macgilchrist: Hi Phil. it was kind of linked to Sheila’s point really, Grant. I quite like your zero sum argument, but it does constrain you a bit. I mean, here in Scotland, SHAP has probably moved its focus in the past 5 to 10 years to include treatment policies. And that’s partly I guess in response to pressure to do something for those already affected despite knowing that so much of what we do should be focused on what works the prevention. So do you think we’re doing the wrong thing paying attention to treatment? we have more stuff because we spend a lot of our time getting down rabbit holes about treatment.
Grant Ennis: I think it’s going to be something to watch. we can’t not do treatment. We have to do treatment. But it should really be the government doing it and then over time does our portfolio for treatment start as 10% and now is it 95 and then when does it become 100%. It’s a very scary slippery slope and it’s tough to watch how it changes our political prioritization.