“So we are suffering, and in terms of health the only way we can come out of this is with the proper use of knowledge that will allow us to prevent 90% of the sicknesses that we are dying from. We need to understand that we have been trained in a self-destructive way of behavior and that we are caught up in a vicious cycle of death.”
—The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, “A Torchlight for America,” pages 131-132
Alcohol-related health problems and the maladies and diseases linked to the use and abuse of intoxicants are a bleak reality. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy recently issued a Public Health Advisory on alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk.
Advisories are issued by the Surgeon General when there is an urgent public health issue that requires the attention of the American people. Such advisories are reserved for significant public health changes that require the country’s immediate awareness and action. They also provide recommendations for the health issue.
According to the report, released Jan. 3, though 72 percent of U.S. adults acknowledged that they drank at least one alcoholic drink per week, less than half knew that a link had been established between the role of alcohol and increased cancer risk—a link which was established in the late 1980s.
In 2019, nearly 100,000 cases of cancer were directly related to alcohol consumption, “This translates to nearly one million preventable cancer cases over ten years in the U.S,” stated the report.
Alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the U.S., behind tobacco and obesity, and was found to contribute to an increased risk for at least seven different types of cancer: breast (in women), colorectal, esophagus, liver, mouth (oral cavity), throat (pharynx) and voice box (larynx).
In 1987, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the specialized cancer agency of the World Health Organization (WHO), classified alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen, the highest level of classification by IARC.
The death toll in the U.S. for alcohol-related cancer deaths is approximately 20,000 annually, which is larger than the number of alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities (about 13,500 annually).

Breast cancer accounts for about 60 percent of these deaths for women; and liver cancer and colorectal cancer together make up approximately 54 percent in men.
The report also found that alcohol-related cancer deaths “shorten the lives of those who die by an average of 15 years.” This accounts for a total of almost 305,000 years of potential life lost due to alcohol-related cancer deaths.
This is critical because based on a CDC survey, as of 2020, 33.6 percent of 12th graders, 20.3 percent of 10th graders and 9.9 percent of 8th graders reported using alcohol within a 30-day period and 16.8 percent of 12th graders, 9.6 percent of 10th graders and 4.5 percent of eighth graders engage in what was termed as “binge drinking,” meaning having five or more drinks in a row within a two-week period.
Current and future generations are being sentenced to death due to a lack of knowledge about the dangers of alcohol consumption.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad has long since sounded the alarm about the consumption of alcohol. In “How to Eat to Live,” Book 1, published in 1967, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad warns on page 111, “To drink whiskey, beer and wine when they have a high alcoholic content is against your and my health.
These drinks have a tendency to be habit forming. When we become habitual drinkers, we are destroying our lives. If you want to live, you should not drink such beverages.”
He further writes in the same chapter, “Tobacco and alcoholic beverages also affect the organs of reproduction of young men. You should never use tobacco, whiskey, beer or wine.
They ruin the reproductive organs and waste away the man power. Tobacco and alcoholic beverages also have this destructive effect upon the reproductive organs of women.”
According to the advisory, alcohol use was found to alter the levels of multiple hormones.
This is not the first time that Dr. Murthy has issued a report linking alcohol and cancer.
During his first tenure as the U.S. Surgeon General in 2016, he issued a “Call to Action to Prevent and Reduce Underage Drinking,” citing alcohol as the most widely used substance of abuse among America’s youth. He also issued, “Facing Addiction in America: The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health.”
In both reports, Dr. Murthy highlights the causal effect of alcohol and increased cancer risk. He noted that underage drinking becomes a risk factor for heavy drinking later in life and “heavy use of alcohol leads to increased risk across the lifespan for acute consequences and for medical problems such as cancers of the oral cavity, larynx, pharynx, and esophagus; liver cirrhosis; pancreatitis; and hemorrhagic stroke.”
Though the current health advisory is limited in scope to solely the causal links between cancer risk and alcohol consumption, the 2016 report chronicled the cost. “Alcohol misuse and alcohol use disorders alone costs the United States approximately $249 billion in lost productivity, health care expenses, law enforcement, and other criminal justice costs,” the report reads.
Top among the five recommendations made in the health advisory is a call to Congress to update the Surgeon General’s health warning label on alcoholic beverages to one that is more visible and reflects the increased risk of cancer with consumption.
The current label, which has been the same since its inception in 1988, reads “GOVERNMENT WARNING: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.”
However, Chicago-based neurologist Dr. Jessica (Wilson) Muhammad doesn’t think a “new label” will significantly impact consumption. “People don’t consume alcohol without knowing, to a certain degree, that it can be injurious,” stated Dr. Jessica Muhammad.
“I don’t think people will dramatically change because the Surgeon General put a label with a sad face on the alcohol while simultaneously, the ‘most interesting man in the world’ [referring to a popular ad campaign promoting a beer brand] is associated with a bottle of alcohol,” she said.
Images promoting parties, laughs and frivolousness, “it’s all happening at the club where the bottles are being passed and all of the examples that are being presented to young people, it’s being presented from that party life that alcohol and drugs are very much—at least depicted to be—a part of,” she continued.
However, more education on these risk factors is evident because, according to the report, “less than half of Americans are aware that alcohol consumption increases cancer risk.”
One of Dr. Muhammad’s biggest concerns was what she said were the glaring absences in the Surgeon General’s recent report. “Who is that 96,000 that had alcohol-related cancer?
What’s their demographic, what’s their age, what population, what social economic status did those groups have? Right around that time, the failure of the medical system was manifesting under the strain of the pandemic, so it’s certainly a conversation starter to look at those things,” Dr. Jessica Muhammad noted.
The U.S. Surgeon General is also calling for a reassessment of the current recommended limits for alcohol consumption. The 2020-2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends a limit of two drinks daily for men and one drink daily for women, yet, one analysis found that
“The relative odds of mouth cancer increased by 40% for those who consumed about one drink daily compared to those who did not drink” and “cohorts of more than one million women found that the relative risk of breast cancer increased by 10% for women who consumed up to about one drink daily, compared to those who did not drink.”
Los Angeles-based Anissa Muhammad has a master’s degree in public health and pointed to alcohol profiteers. “An entire industry is profiting off the weaknesses of those addicted to alcohol products, so the public should expect that an ethics and economics battle will ensue,” she said.
“When one considers the formulation of U.S. policies regarding the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcohol products, it will take a decade, at best, for policymakers, namely Congress, the U.S. Public Health Service, and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau to make new laws and devise appropriate language for labeling,” Anissa Muhammad shared with The Final Call in an email response.
“Currently there are 29.5 million adults in the U.S. that fit the criteria for having an alcohol use disorder; and tens of thousands of youths between the ages of 12 years and 23 years that consume alcohol in one form or another.
How many in those numbers will have a diagnosis of liver, breast, esophagus, colon/rectum or mouth cancer by the time policies and labels have been updated at the above rate? If the government really wants to stop tobacco and alcohol consumption, they must abolish the manufacture and sale of it,” she added.