News - Scientist who reported fatal danger of any dose of alcohol is accused of profiteering

There is no safe level of alcohol. A single drink a day could shave almost three months off your life. And drinking can boost your cancer risk by 23 percent. These are the findings of a controversial British scientist whose headline-grabbing research is influencing government policy and drinkers around the world, The Telegraph reports. Dr. Tim Stockwell’s work—which has been published in The Lancet, among other esteemed organs—has inspired a new crackdown on alcohol that has seen daily drinking guidelines slashed in Canada and Australia. The US may next year follow suit, and the UK anti-alcohol lobby is using Dr. Stockwell’s work as it warms up for a similar fight. But many of Dr. Stockwell’s respected peers say it is far from settled science and have cast doubt on his research. They question his motives and accuse him of being a front for a worldwide temperance lobby that is secretly attempting to ban alcohol. Dr. Stockwell denies this. Speaking to The Telegraph, he in turn accused his detractors of being funded by the alcohol lobby and said his links to temperance societies were fleeting. The anti-alcohol furrow Dr. Stockwell is plowing is not a lonely one: scientists he has collaborated with on research highlighting the dangers of alcohol are in positions of power at major institutions, such as the World Health Organisation; three are currently on the six-person panel that will decide if US drinking guidelines will be reduced.   Dr. Stockwell, who was director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research from 2004 to 2010, began publicly courting controversy last year when he was a key member of a panel that slashed Canada’s recommended weekly allowance from 10 drinks for women and 15 drinks for men to two drinks for each sex. However, it was the final straw for many fellow academics and experts who told The Telegraph they read the report in disbelief, concluding it was yet another example of Dr. Stockwell “cherry picking” the evidence to suit his agenda. Former British government scientist Richard Harding, who gave evidence on safe drinking to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in 2011, told The Telegraph that Dr Stockwell had wrongly taken a correlation to be causal. “Dr Stockwell’s research is essentially epidemiology, which is the study of populations,” Dr Harding said. “You record people’s lifestyle and then see what diseases they get and try to correlate the disease with some aspect of their lifestyle. But it is just a correlation, it’s just an association. Epidemiology can never establish causality on its own.”