Origins and Purposes of Big Alcohol’s Public Relations Groups

This study provides ample reasons to regard the nature of the threat posed by large alcohol companies to health as essentially similar to the threat from the tobacco companies.
This study changes our understanding of the alcohol industry, elucidating similarities and inter-relationships with the tobacco industry.
This study provides a somewhat fragmented appreciation of the unknown history of alcohol industry social aspects organizations, using internal documents. The U.S. distilled spirits industry regarded the harms caused by use of their products as a public relations issue to be managed. The strategy designed by H&K was founded on the importance of managing the science in highly similar ways to the approach they developed for the tobacco companies, reproducing a playbook of key messages that have endured for decades.