Media Snapshots

“Illegal Overtaking and Speeding Top the List of Infractions”

O Globo reports: 

“Over five days of operations, between Friday (17) and Tuesday (21), 1,022 crashes were recorded, with 84 deaths and 1,167 people injured across the country.

“A total of 1,183 cases related to alcohol use were also recorded, including refusals to take the breathalyser test and confirmed intoxication.”

Assessment

Tiradentes Day (Dia de Tiradentes) is a national holiday in Brazil celebrated every year on 21 April to honor Joaquim José da Silva Xavier (also known by his nickname Tirandentes) a leading figure in the Inconfidência Mineira independence movement. Executed on this day in 1792, he is considered a national martyr for independence from Portuguese colonial rule.

The Tiradentes holiday data lays bare the scale of alcohol harm on Brazil’s roads. Over just five days, Brazil’s Federal Highway Police (PRF) recorded 1,183 alcohol-related infractions – including confirmed intoxication and refusals to take the breathalyser test – alongside 84 deaths and 1,167 injuries. While not all crashes involved alcohol, the figures are a reminder that alcohol-impaired driving remains a major contributor to road traffic deaths in Brazil, one of the countries with the highest road fatality rates in the Americas.

Brazil’s 2008 alcohol-impaired driving law prohibits any detectable blood alcohol for drivers – one of the best standards for blood alcohol concentration in the region. But reducing alcohol harm in traffic requires more than a single law. The WHO identifies alcohol-impaired driving prevention measures as one of the alcohol policy best buys, especially when combined with raising alcohol taxation and limitations in alcohol availability and marketing. 

These policy solutions work together: higher alcohol prices reduce overall alcohol use, which in turn lowers the number of people who get behind the wheel after consuming alcohol. Limitations in alcohol availability and marketing have similar upstream effects. 

The numbers of deaths and injuries due to alcohol-impaired driving just during one holiday illustrate the need for action on alcohol harm – to both enforce existing alcohol laws and rules, to improve enforcement through better investments in random-breath testing on Brazilian roads, and to raise alcohol taxes to lower population level alcohol consumption and harm as well as raising revenue that can be used for investing in healthcare and road safety measures.

In Vietnam, alcohol’s death toll on the roads became a clear and powerful reason for people to call for alcohol policy action and for the government and parliament to ultimately adopt modern a modern alcohol law and raise alcohol taxes.

“Government Fears Backlash From ‘More Expensive Beer’ and Stalls Regulation of the Sin Tax”

O Globo reports:

“The economic team will now send the bill – whose text was already drafted by the Ministry of Finance – only after the elections. Since picanha and ‘a cold beer’ were among the main symbols of Lula’s campaign, the government wants to avoid handing the opposition a ready-made line of attack. Instead of a bill, whose process is slower and noisier, the issuing of a Provisional Measure is being studied.”

Other Articles on Same Topic

• Government Expects to Send Selective Tax Rate Bill by April (Contábeis)
• Government Stalls Regulation of the Sin Tax to Avoid a Hike in Beer Prices (NTD Brasil)
• Government Stalls the Sin Tax (Edson Valério)

Assessment

The Selective Alcohol Tax was established under the 2023 constitutional amendment on tax reform and Complementary Law 214/2025, with implementation scheduled for January 2027. The rate bill that has now been postponed is the legislation that would set the actual alcohol tax levels.

Contábeis reported as recently as 24 March 2026 that the proposal was on track for delivery to Congress by the end of April, after slipping from a March target due to internal disagreements over the Management Committee structure. The post-election timing therefore represents a sharp reversal.

The industry’s documented lobbying record has consistently pushed for an early resolution with a focus on an alcohol tax design that favours beer – the dominant alcohol product in Brazil, accounting for around 84 litres per capita, 96% of which is produced by Ambev (owned by AB InBev), Heineken Brazil, and Grupo Petrópolis.

From that vantage, a post-election delay is not a clean alcohol industry win.

What the delay does not reverse is the success Big Beer has had in shaping the political discourse around alcohol taxation. The “more expensive beer” framing has been carefully cultivated through industry lobbying, front group activity – including CervBrasil/SindCerv, the Brazilian beer industry association whose leadership is staffed by Ambev and Heineken executives. The result is a political environment in which governing politicians treat the taxation of a harmful product as too costly to defend in public. This information environment excludes realities where the majority of Brazilians support raising alcohol taxes, are concerned about alcohol harm, and want their government to take action.

• 93% of Brazilians recognise alcohol consumption as a concern.
• 77% see addressing the problems associated with alcohol as a government responsibility.
• 62% agree that higher taxation on alcohol would effectively help reducing consumption.
• 62% support alcohol price increases.
• 61% endorse taxes to reduce alcohol consumption.

With the delaying of the bill, alcohol policy advocates have an opportunity to inform the public and political discourse about alcohol taxation with these realities – people’s concerns about alcohol harms and people’s support for the government to raise taxes and prices.

At the same time, the underlying problem persists regardless of when the bill is tabled.

The post-election window is therefore both an opening and a test. It removes the most distorting force on the debate – campaign optics – and gives advocates several months to make the evidence visible. 

For alcohol policy advocates, the priority over the coming months is to keep the drumbeat going:

1. on the scale of alcohol harm in Brazil – rising in poorer communities,
2. on the public costs that harm imposes on health systems, productivity, and families, and
3. on the case that health oriented and evidence-based alcohol taxation works.

When the rate bill finally returns, the levels must be ambitious enough to genuinely reduce alcohol affordability – not a façade tax calibrated to cater to Big Beer instead of the Brazilian people by keeping beer cheap and alcohol harm high.

“The Government Should Have Already Presented This Tax to Congress”

Correio Braziliense reports: 

“Sindcerv executive president Márcio Maciel said the lack of clarity is worrying the sector because companies have already begun financial and operational planning for 2027.

“He stated that one of the principles of the tax reform is tax burden neutrality, and argued that the total tax burden should not increase.”

Assessment

Sindcerv’s intervention is a textbook example of how the alcohol industry uses the tax reform process to lock in low rates before the public health evidence can shape the debate. The lobby’s demand for “tax burden neutrality” – that the total tax on beer must not rise under the new system – is the opposite of what an effective health-based alcohol excise tax is designed to achieve.

The beer lobby’s central claim that Brazilian beer is “among the most heavily taxed in Latin America” and that Brazilian beer carries a 56% tax “burden” is built on a methodology that bundles every tax across the entire production chain – energy, transport, packaging, retail – and presents the cumulative figure as the tax in the consumer price.

As Big Alcohol Exposed has documented, the WHO’s standardised measure reveals the beer lobby’s lie: at 2.28%, Brazil’s beer excise tax share is the lowest in the Region of the Americas among countries that actually tax beer. Honduras taxes beer four times more on this measure; Nicaragua nearly ten times. Even IBPT’s own 2026 data places the total tax share on canned beer at 39%, not 56%.

Sindcerv presents itself as the voice of nearly 2,000 breweries, but its board is supplied entirely by Ambev and Heineken Brasil, which together control around 85% of beer production in Brazil. The beer lobby is a coordination platform for two global alcohol giants whose pricing strategies already demonstrate the market’s capacity to absorb significant price increases. But these increases flow currently to shareholders, making the people of Brazil pay for the harm caused by the products of the major beer companies, instead of becoming public revenue where they can be used to pay for the costs of harm and to reduce this burden.

Reports indicate that the Lula government has decided to delay the selective tax rate proposal until after the October 2026 elections, wary of handing the opposition a “more expensive beer” campaign theme. That delay is itself a victory for the alcohol industry lobby, which benefits from every month the current low rates remain in place.

WHO recommends that countries raise real alcohol prices by at least 50% by 2035.

A working paper from the Universidade Católica de Brasília recommends a selective tax on beer of at least 34.3%. The post-election debate is Brazil’s window to set rates at the levels the evidence supports and the people want. But the alcohol industry is working to close it before it opens.

“Suicide Is an Extremely Complex Phenomenon and Understanding It Requires Recognising the Profound Despair Many People Experience”

Infobae reports: 

“In 2024, Mexico recorded 8,556 suicides, according to INEGI figures, a trend that replicates the global pattern identified by the World Health Organization: every year, 727,000 people die by suicide worldwide.

“The deputy pointed to personal crises, episodes of high stress due to family or work reasons, and the presence of physical illness or chronic pain among the direct causes. She also identified depression, anxiety, and alcohol and other substance use as factors that tend to intertwine with suicidal behaviour.”

Assessment

The forum is a step forward in recognising suicide as a public health priority in Mexico, but the discussion illustrates a familiar gap: alcohol use is named as a risk factor, yet alcohol policy is absent from the proposed solutions. The specialists called for a national prevention system coordinating health, education, and social development – helplines, school wellbeing programmes, community support networks – without addressing the availability and affordability of a substance they themselves identified as a driver of the problem.

The evidence on alcohol and suicide is well established. WHO identifies alcohol use as one of the leading risk factors for suicide, both as an acute trigger and as a contributor to the mental health conditions that underlie suicidal behaviour. Research across 39 low- and middle-income countries has confirmed that alcohol use is a major risk factor for suicide attempts among adolescents – the same age group most affected in Mexico. The Pan American Health Organisation has recommended alcohol policy action as part of a new mental health agenda for the Americas, recognising that population-level interventions – taxation, limitations on alcohol availability and marketing – reduce overall alcohol use and with it, the burden of alcohol-attributable suicide.

Evidence that Movendi International has documented also shows that raising alcohol taxes is effective in preventing and reducing suicide.

Mexico recorded 8,556 suicides in 2024, with young people aged 15–29 among the most affected. Mexican civil society has already laid out a comprehensive alcohol policy reform agenda centred on raising alcohol taxes, lowering alcohol availability, and banning alcohol advertising.

A suicide prevention strategy that names alcohol as a risk factor but ignores alcohol policy fails the Mexican people because it omits effective and science proven solutions for mental health promotion.

“Advocates push for higher alcohol taxes to deter Filipinos from drinking”

Rappler reports: 

“Health advocates and lawmakers are pushing for higher taxes on alcoholic beverages, citing their disruptive effects on Filipino families. The Philippine Medical Association (PMA) said alcohol – a toxic, psychoactive substance – is linked to over 200 diseases and injury-related conditions, causing 47 deaths every day in the country.

“Akbayan Representative Dadah Kiram Ismula asserted that even small amounts of alcohol are harmful: ‘There is no safe level when it comes to alcohol. Anything that you put into your mouth, as long as it’s alcohol, is not safe, even if it’s just one shot. This has also been proven by our medical doctors.'”

Other Articles on the Same Topic

• Health Advocates Launch Campaign to Address Alcohol’s Harm on Filipino Families (Manila Standard)
• Health Advocates Lament Health, Social Costs of Alcohol (SunStar)
• Health Advocates Push for Higher Alcohol Taxes to Curb 47 Daily Deaths (SunStar)
• 47 Filipinos Die Daily From Alcohol Harm: Akbayan Backs Higher Sin Taxes to Fund Public Health (Politiko)
• Health Advocates Push for Higher Sin Tax to Curb Alcohol Consumption (GMA News)

Assessment

The Philippines is witnessing a dedicated advocacy initiative that combines public health evidence, personal testimony, and concrete legislative proposals – a multi-pronged initiative to advance alcohol taxation.

The numbers underpinning the campaign are stark. According to the Philippine Medical Association (PMA),

• 47 Filipinos die each day from causes due to alcohol,
  • with 45.2% of those deaths linked to liver cancer.
• On a social level, eight out of ten Filipinos report knowing someone who has been harmed by alcohol, with community violence the most commonly cited form of harm.

A WHO report published in January 2026 identified the Philippines as one of the countries where alcohol remains dangerously cheap. This finding underpins the advocates’ case that low alcohol affordability is driving harm.

The legislative proposals are specific and ambitious. Akbayan’s House Bill No. 5475 proposes a 22% ad valorem tax on distilled spirits plus a specific tax that would escalate from P88 to P214 per proof liter between 2026 and 2030, with 6% annual increases thereafter. For fermented liquors and pre-mixed beverages, the specific tax would rise from P50 to P73 per liter over the same period. A companion bill, HB 5476, targets pre-mixed alcoholic beverages specifically – a category that advocates have identified as deliberately marketed to young people because alcohol companies use colourful packaging, sweet flavours, and low prices. Together, the bills are expected to generate P300 billion over six years, earmarked for universal health coverage.

The Philippines has a good track record on tobacco taxation – the 2012 Sin Tax Reform Act is widely cited as a model for health-focused tax policy – but alcohol taxation has lagged far behind.

The staggering economic cost of alcohol harm in the country makes clear that the current tax structure is not delivering the public health returns it should. WHO identifies alcohol taxation as one of the alcohol policy best buys, and the breadth of the coalition now mobilising – seven lawmakers, the PMA, the Sin Tax Coalition, and civil society organisations – suggests the momentum for alcohol tax reform is accelerating. The campaign’s framing around family harm and affordability speaks directly to the lived experience of Filipino communities, and the legislative detail in HB 5475 and HB 5476 gives policymakers a concrete vehicle to act on.

“Farm Sales Customers Use More Alcohol”

Drugnews reports:

“Those who drink relatively large amounts of alcohol are overrepresented among those who have used the farm sales option. This is the finding of a CAN analysis covering the second half of 2025.

“People who bought alcohol directly from producers also drank significantly larger amounts of alcohol than both Systembolaget customers and alcohol consumers as a whole. Compared to those who had only bought alcohol at Systembolaget, those who bought directly from producers drank approximately 50 percent more,” says Björn Trolldal, researcher at CAN.

Other Articles on the Same Topic

• CAN: This Is How Many Buy Alcohol Through Farm Sales (SvD)
• Farm Sales in Sweden – Who Is the Buyer? (CAN)

Assessment

Less than a year after Sweden’s alcohol “farm sales” system took effect on 1 June 2025, the first independent data have arrived – and they contradict nearly every reassurance the government offered when pushing the worsening of the state-run alcohol retail monopoly system through Parliament.

CAN’s analysis of the second half of 2025 reveals three findings that should concern policymakers:

• First, people who buy alcohol through so called “farm sales” use approximately 50 percent more alcohol than those who only purchase from Systembolaget.
• Second, the youngest adult age group (20–29) is the most likely to use the system, with four percent buying from producers each month, compared to under one percent among those over 65.
• Third, the most purchased product category is strong beer – not wine, and certainly not the small-batch artisanal products that were the centrepiece of the political narrative used to justify the move to undermine the state-run alcohol retail monopoly system.

This matters because the entire political case for so called “farm sales” was built on an image of small-scale rural winemakers welcoming occasional tourists for a tasting and a modest purchase. Even the name for the proposal was meant to paint such idyllic picture.

Movendi Sweden exposed this framing as a manufactured myth well before the parliamentary vote, documenting that the majority of breweries and distilleries in Sweden are located in urban areas, not the countryside, and that the real beneficiaries would be larger commercial operations.

The CAN data now bear this out: the customer profile is not a middle-aged tourist visiting a vineyard, but a young, urban person with higher-than-average alcohol use, buying strong beer.

The CAN data illustrates that criticism of the move to introduce so called “farm sales” were also correct in questioning the very name of the move.

The finding that farm sales customers have significantly higher alcohol use than the average consumer is particularly important in the context of Sweden’s alcohol retail monopoly model. Systembolaget exists precisely to prevent market-driven targeting of higher-risk groups. When a parallel retail channel emerges that disproportionately attracts younger people with heavier alcohol use, it undermines the public health logic of the entire system. This is exactly the dynamic that WHO has warned against when countries worsen their standards for alcohol retail.

The Swedish government’s own inquiry released earlier this year confirmed that Systembolaget and alcohol taxation are effective instruments that save lives, estimating that abolishing the monopoly would lead to a 16 percent rise in alcohol use and approximately one million additional illness cases per year. Yet the same government continues to erode the monopoly’s effectiveness through so called “farm sales”, proposed tax cuts for small breweries, and now the removal of the food requirement for alcohol serving licences.

“The Government Has Based Its Decision on Wrong Facts”

Accent reports:

“It appears to be a persistent myth that Finland had a food requirement for alcohol serving that was abolished in 2018. This is not true, but because this has been repeated so many times in text, various AI tools on the internet present it as fact. Which it is not.

“Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, Finland stopped requiring food service as a condition for granting serving licences. So in practice, no food requirement has existed in Finland since the beginning of the 1980s,” says Thomas Karlsson, head of unit for preventive work at THL, Finland’s equivalent of the Public Health Agency.

Other Articles on the Same Topic

• Food Requirement Abolished Despite Health Criticism (Drugnews)
• Sharp Criticism of Plans to Remove the Food Requirement (Accent)
• New Government Announcement: The Food Requirement Will Be Abolished (Accent)

Assessment

The revelation that the Swedish government built its impact assessment for removing the food requirement on a factual error about Finland is remarkable – and deeply concerning. The government’s Simplification Council cited the “limited impact” of Finland’s supposed 2018 removal of its food requirement as key evidence that Sweden could safely follow suit.

But as Thomas Karlsson of THL confirms, Finland has not had a food requirement since the early 1980s. The comparison the government relied on does not exist.

This matters because the government’s own harm estimates – 11 additional deaths and approximately 1,300 additional hospitalisations per year – were calibrated against the non-existent Finnish reform. Björn Trolldal, researcher at CAN (the Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs), warns that these figures are likely underestimates: with the correct baseline, the projected impact could be significantly worse.

The food requirement has long served as a protective function in Swedish alcohol policy. It ensures that venues holding serving licences operate as restaurants or food-service establishments rather than premises solely dedicated to alcohol sales. The government investigation “A Safe Upbringing” (SOU 2024:23) found that the food requirement reduces intoxication, limits disorder, and supports safe serving practices. The Public Health Agency of Sweden has recommended retaining the requirement.

Movendi Sweden – the country’s people’s movement for alcohol policy – has been among the many opponents of the proposal. Kristina Sperkova, president of Movendi Sweden, has pointed out that the reform is neither requested nor needed by the Swedish public, and that it only serves the interests of the current government and the alcohol industry rather than the public interest in people’s safety and health.

The government is choosing to pursue a policy that will lead to increased harm and insecurity,” Ms. Sperkova told Drugnews.

Kristina Sperkova, President, Movendi Sweden

The alcohol industry, meanwhile, stands to pocket an estimated SEK 3.9 billion per year from the lowered standards for selling and serving alcohol. It is noteworthy that one of the many stakeholders who supported maintaining the standard is the Hotel and Restaurant Union, representing the people working with selling and serving alcohol. They wanted to food requirement to stay. This juxtaposition shows that the ones benefiting will only be the alcohol industry raking in a windfall that CAN’s Mr. Trolldal warns is likely to translate into lower prices, higher alcohol use, and more harm.

The removal of the food requirement is part of a broader pattern of alcohol policy degradation under the current centre-right Swedish government. The same administration pushed through alcohol “farm sales” legislation in April 2025 that threatens the legal basis of the Systembolaget monopoly, proposed a reduced alcohol tax for small breweries in the 2026 budget, and is now removing a public health-oriented serving licence requirement that has been in place for decades. This comes even as the government’s own inquiry confirmed earlier this year that Sweden’s alcohol policy instruments save lives and that dismantling them would increase harm.