AUSTRALIAN researchers are taking a stand against a common practice of accepting funds from the alcohol industry, to prevent legitimising “ineffective education programmes”.
The issue came to a head this week as the Australian government made moves to ensure that taxes on high-alcohol drinks, introduced a year ago, continue. The so-called “alcopop tax” has raised $300 million and has been an effective way of curbing problem drinking, says the Australian government.
The liquor industry wants the funds to go to – an “evidence-based research and social change organisation” that they helped to set up and fund. But in four letters in the this week, more than 50 health researchers say that the money should go to an independent research body.
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Industry-linked bodies in the UK and the US fund research and campaigns aimed at stopping problem drinking through education programmes, but these are largely ineffective, claims of Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria, and one of the letters’ authors: “They fund research into interventions that have been shown not to work. That is what they love, because they need to make money.”
Miller aims to encourage researchers globally to refuse drinks-industry funding in an upcoming series of papers in Addiction.
