Programming note: Due to the holiday, Fingers will not publish a Weekender this Sunday. I’m taking some time off to relax, hope you’re able to do likewise. Regular publishing resumes next week.—Dave.

The beverage-alcohol industry loves a boogeyman to blame for its woes. THC. Ozempic. Those fucking Zoomers. You know: the usual suspects. Since the dawn of the second Trump administration and the ascent of Robert “Flesh” Kennedy, Jr. (that’s what the F. stands for; few know this) to a controlling position over America’s once-exemplary public-health establishment, the trade hasn’t been as vocal about one of its favorite scapegoats for soft sales. But it’s still out there. Lurking. Neo-prohibitionism! Those lab-coated nincompoops and nanny-state bureaucrats trying to do Temperance 2.0! Those shadowy sober forces pulling the strings from behind the World Health Organization’s veneer of liberal legitimacy!

Ahem. Sorry. Lost my cool there for a moment. Today on The Fingers Podcast I’m joined by Isabella Cueto, a chronic disease reporter at STAT, an award-winning news outlet now celebrating 10 years of covering health and medicine in the United States. Since the pandemic, she’s been digging into the relationship between the bev-alc industry and public-health institutions like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Now, Isabella is not, in fact, a neo-prohibitionist. She drinks, as do I. But she’s also keen to explicate the power dynamics that surround booze-related policymaking in this country, and to understand how they shape the science on booze-related health risks, as am I. Isabella’s recent reporting suggests there’s so much more to those important stories that what the mainstream media—speaking of shadowy forces—has yet mustered the interest to explore. On this episode, we explore it, from ICCPUD, to Emily Oster, to the Trump administration’s remarkable disinterest in “the deadliest drug,” and beyond.

The Fingers Podcast is exclusively for paying subscribers, and there are two ways to listen:

I’m working on getting the The Fingers Podcast archive back online, too. I’ve already salvaged and re-uploaded three old episodes; keep an eye on the archive for more as I’m able to dig them up! More to come soon.

The transcript excerpts below have been edited for length and clarity. This interview was recorded June 12th, 2026.

Cueto: I've been paying a lot of attention to Make America Healthy Again, RFK Jr's whole movement. As part of that, you hear people talking about the dangers in the grocery store, and how people need to stay away from ultra-processed foods and seed oils. But there is this very clear exclusion of alcohol, which is, as far as public-health risks go, pretty low-hanging fruit, in there with tobacco. We spent the majority of this year actually digging into how the Trump administration is thinking about alcohol, and why it seems like alcohol is completely left out of MAHA, looking at all these different angles. And let me clarify that our focus is on like heavy drinking and excessive drinking. There's so much debate around low to moderate, right? Which—

Infante: That's right, baby. All you gotta do is “drink moderately.” What does that mean? Fuck you, don’t ask that question! Next question!

Cueto: So we're like, well, everyone can agree that heavy and excess drinking is bad, and like, we know that that's a problem. So why does it seem like even that is not talked about? So that has led us down this rabbit hole.

Cueto: You take that Dietary Guidelines for Americans change, you take Dr. Oz, who is now the head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid—

Infante: Doesn't read Fingers, by the way.

Cueto: Yeah, I don't think he reads Fingers.

Infante: Not yet. He doesn’t read Fingers yet, Isabella.

Cueto: Right. Future Fingers reader Dr. Oz—question mark—during the rollout said that basically the takeaway from the DGA is don't have alcohol for breakfast, and then follow it up the next day on X, and said “Brunch is obviously different than breakfast.” There was this sort of lighthearted tone in the rollout.

Infante: We’re having fun! We’re telling jokes!

Cueto: Onlookers, especially in the public-health space, were sort of horrified at that, given everything we know about alcohol-related harms. Fast forward to the sweeping cuts that the Trump administration made at HHS. As part of those cuts, the CDC program devoted to alcohol was completely—all the staff are gone, basically, from that program. There were plenty of cuts to other agencies that also handle alcohol-related tracking, research, and prevention work. There are several databases that are used to follow this problem that have been impeded, or, you know, basically are in limbo as a result of Trump actions. These various things make you wonder: Is this actually a problem they're taking seriously? Earlier this year, Kennedy unveiled the Great American Recovery Initiative, which is an addiction-focused project that's meant to coordinate the government's response to addiction, but it largely focuses on opioids and on people with substance-use disorders who are also homeless, and therefore alcohol is once again not really a central piece of that.

Cueto: A lot of public-health people are like, “We're not saying ‘ban alcohol.’ We're not trying to go back to Prohibition. But if alcohol is basically going to be on every corner, in every store, there has to be some way to measure, to follow, to give people the information they need to be smart consumers.” I think that's a key sticking point, especially in the era of MAHA. Yet with alcohol, there's very little nutrition information, there's very few disclosures on the actual containers, people have a very loose sense of, like, how much they're drinking, how much they should be drinking, what—

Infante: What a “drink” even is. Like what the unit is.

Cueto: Exactly. And then you also get into, the healthcare system itself. Most of us may be asked about our drinking in sort of a vague, superficial sense at our annual checkup, but there's really bad follow-up. There's very little referral to treatment. There's very little advice that providers are giving their patients when they do flag that they're drinking a bit too much. And then we get into the actual addiction-treatment landscape, and that's a mess of its own. We're just like basically throwing people into a choose-your-own-adventure when they have an alcohol-use disorder.

Since starting The Fingers Interview series back up, I’ve spoken with:

Before I wound it down, I spoke with a bunch of very interesting folks from inside the booze business, and beyond it. Including:

And probably a few more that I missed as I navigated the depths of the archives.