On Nov. 18, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law a requirement that alcohol producers slap a 41-word label on their packaging warning consumers that their product could cause accidents and health problems, including birth defects.
By the end of the decade, every producer would comply. And why not? The initial law carried a daily fine of $10,000 for noncompliance, a penalty that’s only grown through cost of living adjustments to $25,561 a day.
The law marked the first time ever that the federal government had required alcohol to carry a health warning. Federal authorities might expand it now, following research and remarks from now-former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. In early January, Murthy highlighted what he believed to be the “direct link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk.”
Based on the fallout from the 1988 law, an expanded alcohol warning label probably isn’t that much to worry about.
At the time, you wouldn’t have thought that. The law followed years of panic and acrimony over the need for one — as well as over the scope, the wording, its placement, even its font size. “It’s almost impossible to read,” complained U.S. Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee in November 1989 as the window for compliance closed. “The [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] has purposely allowed the industry to come up with a label that is illegible.”
The law, too, arrived in an era much like our own of shifting drinking habits and fresh concerns over what people were putting into their bodies.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program (D.A.R.E.) both had sprung up in the early 1980s to warn of the dangers of alcohol. Reagan and first lady Nancy would address the nation in primetime from the White House residence in September 1986 about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, particularly to young people. Perhaps most significantly, the U.S. government under Reagan used the non-disbursement of federal highway funds to cajole states into raising their drinking ages one after the other to 21.
Moreover, though brewers and consumers couldn’t have known at the time, post-Prohibition beer sales had peaked for the 20th century in the early 1980s. They wouldn’t tumble precipitously but they wouldn’t ascend sudden heights either.
Shadowing everything, too, was a boom in health and fitness. Hundreds of exercise videos debuted just in time for the rise of the in-home VCR; and gym chains Bally Total Fitness, Planet Fitness, Crunch and Equinox would launch in the 1980s and early 1990s. It’s safe to assume that more Americans than ever before were hitting the gym; and buff lunkheads like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarznegger and Tom Cruise were top box office draws.
In the end, individual breweries as well as trade groups publicly supported the law — the Beer Institute pronounced it reasonable (as well as readable).
In fact, many in the industry quietly welcomed the warning label. That’s because consumers were routinely suing breweries for health damages, including birth defects and even early death. For instance, the widow of a 26-year-old Pennsylvania man who died from pancreatitis sued Stroh because she said her husband’s near-daily habit of a few Old Milwaukees caused the disease. A trial court rejected the claim, but an appeals court reversed that decision in 1987. The case appears to have been settled or withdrawn.
Such lawsuits were horrible publicity and harmed the share prices of larger breweries. The 1988 warning label, then, helped indemnify breweries in much the same way that tobacco companies typically escaped liability for their products following warning labels beginning in the 1960s.
Despite this climate hostile to alcohol — and including the unprecedented health warning — a curious thing happened after 1988. Beer and the brewing industry exploded in all sorts of directions. The most obvious was the rise of craft beer, which included a steep jump in the number of breweries as well as brewpubs and taprooms. Styles once thought to be in terminal decline (think IPA and porter) were resurrected, and macro producers enjoyed some of their strongest product rollouts in years (think Coors’ Blue Moon or Miller’s Plank Road line, including Red Dog).
Yes, there would be shakeouts and dips, and downright crises — especially the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, by and large, brewing took the warning label, and the changes around it, and kept on ticking (or tippling).
The lesson is not apples-to-apples transferable to today. The brewing industry now faces a generational change in attitudes toward drinking that wasn’t present in the 1980s. Plus, no one had conceived of hard seltzer (I think). But there were definitely challenges at the time that spelled trouble — and a government health warning was the last thing the industry needed.
Yet, cometh the boom after that label.
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