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Background: Low‐Risk Alcohol Drinking Guidelines (LRDGs) aim to reduce the harms caused by alcohol. However, considerable discrepancies exist in the 'low‐risk' thresholds employed by different countries. Argument/analysis: Drawing upon Canada's LRDGs update process, the current paper offers the following propositions for debate regarding the establishment of 'low‐risk' thresholds in national guidelines: (1) as an indicator of health loss, years of life lost (YLL) has several advantages that could make it more suitable for setting guidelines than deaths, premature deaths or disability adjusted years of life (DALYs) lost. (2) Presenting age‐specific guidelines may not be the most appropriate way of providing LRDGs. (3) Given past overemphasis on the so‐called protective effects of alcohol on health, presenting cause‐specific guidelines may not be appropriate compared with a 'whole health' effect derived from a weighted composite risk function comprising conditions that are causally related to alcohol consumption. (4) To help people reduce their alcohol use, presenting different risk zones associated with alcohol consumption instead of a single low risk threshold may be advantageous. Conclusions: National LRDGs should be based on years of life lost and should be neither age‐specific nor cause‐specific. We recommend using risk zones rather than a single drinking threshold to help people assess their own risk and encourage the adoption of behaviours with positive health impacts across the alcohol use spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and aim: To understand the use of psychoactive substances, one must consider the context and the social circumstances in which the substance use occurs. This paper discusses alcohol use from a socio‐cultural perspective, based on the use of alcoholic beverages among the Portuguese servicemen who fought in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–74). Method: In‐depth interviews were carried out with 17 former Portuguese soldiers. Simultaneously, extensive bibliographic and documentary research was carried out based on a broad set of biographical and autobiographical texts by former military personnel. Finally, an on‐line survey (n = 210) was conducted among ex‐combatants of the Portuguese Colonial War. Results: Alcohol drinking among Portuguese servicemen was high during the Portuguese Colonial War. Socio‐cultural factors (such as regarding alcohol consumption as therapeutic and affirming masculinity) explain why alcohol drinking was so intense and frequent, and why repeated drunken behaviour was tolerated and undervalued by the military authorities, who considered it normal and not a health problem or disorder. Conclusion: The use of alcohol in the Portuguese Colonial War is an empirical example of how what is considered 'acceptable', 'normal' or 'pathological' may depend more on socio‐cultural norms than on objective and measurable criteria, including clinical criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aims: A range of experimental paradigms claim to measure the cognitive processes underpinning alcohol use, suggesting that heightened attentional bias, greater approach tendencies and reduced cue‐specific inhibitory control are important drivers of consumption. This paper identifies methodological shortcomings within this broad domain of research and exemplifies them in studies focused specifically on alcohol‐related attentional bias. Argument and analysis: We highlight five main methodological issues: (i) the use of inappropriately matched control stimuli; (ii) opacity of stimulus selection and validation procedures; (iii) a credence in noisy measures; (iv) a reliance on unreliable tasks; and (v) variability in design and analysis. This is evidenced through a review of alcohol‐related attentional bias (64 empirical articles, 68 tasks), which reveals the following: only 53% of tasks use appropriately matched control stimuli; as few as 38% report their stimulus selection and 19% their validation procedures; less than 28% used indices capable of disambiguating attentional processes; 22% assess reliability; and under 2% of studies were pre‐registered. Conclusions: Well‐matched and validated experimental stimuli, the development of reliable cognitive tasks and explicit assessment of their psychometric properties, and careful consideration of behavioural indices and their analysis will improve the methodological rigour of cognitive alcohol research. Open science principles can facilitate replication and reproducibility in alcohol research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, 'alcohol's harm to others' (AHTO) has emerged as an international approach to studying alcohol problems and informing policy. The AHTO approach seeks to increase political will for alcohol policy by mapping, measuring and often costing harms beyond the person who drinks (e.g. family members, co‐workers). In this paper we consider the implications of a 'harm to others' approach for illicit drugs. We ask whether it could and should be used as a policy tool, given the high risks of further stigmatizing people who use drugs. We consider the ways in which the concept and measurement of 'harm to others' may be either productive or potentially harmful, depending on the extent to which the AHTO is replicated for illicit drugs. Shifting the language may assist: the term 'harm from others' appears to carry less risk of stigma. In addition, all harms inclusive of drug supply and drug consumption need to be included if a full picture of harms that accrue to other people from illicit drugs is to be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on an J. McCambridge and colleagues' "Transformative Research on the Alcohol industry, Policy and Science (TRAPS) research programme. Topics discussed include evidence provided by such research on alcohol industry funding, significance of analyses of the activities of other harmful industries, and comment on the concept in the paper regarding the importance of studying the fusion of political, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and making strategies.