Alcohol as a Hazardous Chemical: It May Make Governor’s List

A number of groups that supported Proposition 65 are urging that alcohol be placed on the governor’s initial list of hazardous chemicals--a listing that could lead to warning labels on beer, wine and liquor containers because alcohol consumption by pregnant women can cause birth defects.

These groups point to strong scientific evidence that heavy consumption of alcoholic beverages leads to fetal alcohol syndrome, the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Some argue that the linking of alcohol to birth defects by the U.S. Surgeon General and the President’s Council on Environmental Quality gives Gov. George Deukmejian little choice but to place the chemical on his initial list, which is due by March 1.

“We think there is a very good argument that Proposition 65 will require warning labels on alcohol beverage containers,” said Jim Shultz, a lobbyist with Consumers Union, one of the groups that wrote to Deukmejian.

In the past, Shultz has watched legislation to force such labeling die in the face of industry opposition. Similar efforts in Congress have also been beaten back.

But despite agreement by several top state health officials that excessive alcohol consumption by pregnant women can cause retardation and other birth defects, Deukmejian is unlikely to place alcohol on his first list of chemicals covered by Proposition 65, a top health official told The Times.

The Administration’s working group for implementing the anti-toxics initiative will probably recommend that the governor begin with a minimal list of cancer-causing substances specified in Proposition 65--a list that does not include alcohol, deputy health and welfare secretary Thomas E. Warriner said in an interview. The question of whether to add alcohol and other chemicals that cause birth defects would be left to a panel of experts to be appointed later, he said.

Even if alcohol is eventually added to the governor’s Proposition 65 list, the initiative does not spell out precisely what steps must be taken to alert consumers of the potential hazards. Already one industry representative, who asked that he not be identified, is arguing that warning requirements could be satisfied by posting signs in bars, restaurants and retail stores--similar to the posting requirement imposed by the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County last year.

The trade organizations representing wine and beer industries contend that the case against moderate drinking is inconclusive, and argue that Proposition 65 should not be applied when the established danger is from abuse of a product.

“Labeling fails to distinguish between use and abuse,” said Donald Shea, a consultant to the Beer Institute in Washington. “It is a scare-mongering tactic that will not reach the intended audience.”

“That one glass of wine with a meal (might cause birth defects) flies in the face of human behavior for 1,000 years,” said John De Luca, president of the Wine Institute in San Francisco.

The Beer Institute contributed $92,000 to the unsuccessful effort to defeat Proposition 65. Although the Wine Institute did not help finance the anti-65 campaign, its largest member, E & J Gallo Winery, contributed $25,000, according to campaign records filed in the secretary of state’s office.

Even one of the drafters of Proposition 65, former Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Barry Groveman, argues that labeling of alcoholic beverages goes beyond the intent of the initiative. “To put alcohol on the list because of its effect at abusive levels wouldn’t make sense,” he said.

But another of the authors, Carl Pope, the Sierra Club’s political director, said that the Council on Environmental Quality review may require that alcohol be listed and, if that is the case, then the measure would require warning consumers. He and others point to language in Proposition 65 that calls for regulations to ensure “to the extent possible” that the burden for the warnings fall on producers and packagers, rather than retail sellers.

Top officials at three different state agencies agree that the case against excessive alcohol consumption by pregnant women is a strong one. Two of those agencies--the Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs and the Department of Developmental Services--recommend that pregnant women avoid all alcohol because of more controversial evidence that even moderate or occasional drinking can harm the fetus.

The anti-toxics ballot measure, approved overwhelmingly by voters Nov. 4, requires the governor to publish by March 1 a list of “chemicals known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity.” The list must be updated at least once a year. Twelve months after a substance is listed, businesses would be required to warn consumers of exposure to that chemical.

In a letter to Deukmejian, representatives of 14 groups that backed the initiative urged that the governor’s initial list include a series of chemicals identified in 1981 as hazardous to human reproduction by the President’s Council of Environmental Quality.

Alcohol and tobacco smoke are the most common of the substances reviewed by the council, which also listed the banned insecticide DDT and thalidomide, a tranquilizer known to cause severe limb deformities.

A few months after the council issued its report, the U.S. Surgeon General proclaimed: “Each patient should be told about the risk of alcohol consumption during pregnancy, and advised not to drink alcoholic beverages and to be aware of the alcoholic content of food and drugs.”

Within the Deukmejian Administration, health officials do not dispute that finding. “The fact that alcohol has a known adverse effect on the fetus is very well established,” said Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, Deukmejian’s health services director.

“We would clearly tell people to avoid alcohol during pregnancy completely,” said Robin Brett, a spokeswoman for the Department of Developmental Services.

The head of the Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, Chauncey L. Veatch III, said that his agency is mailing out brochures, in English and Spanish, that recommend that women “reach for something like orange juice or tomato juice instead of liquor, beer and wine” during pregnancy. “This is truly preventable,” Veatch said. “If the mother does not drink it is preventable and we want to get the word out.”

During the fall campaign, there was relatively little discussion of the initiative’s requirement that businesses warn the public of exposures to chemicals believed to cause cancer or reproductive effects, including birth defects, miscarriages, stillbirths and sterility.

However, opponents did argue that the measure would lead to a confusing proliferation of warnings for such common products as peanut butter, corn oil and decaffeinated coffee, all of which may contain low levels of substances thought to cause cancer.

Instead, the opposing sides emphasized the initiative’s ban on the release of unsafe amounts of toxic chemicals into drinking water supplies--a prohibition that business and agricultural groups contended would damage California’s economy, but that proponents said was necessary to protect the public health. Opponents complained that the discharge limits applied only to businesses employing ten or more workers, exempting both smaller enterprises and government agencies--arguing that Proposition 65 was “full of exemptions.”

Since the passage of the initiative, the Administration has scurried around to comply with yet another Proposition 65 provision--one that requires certain public officials, beginning Jan. 1, to inform county supervisors and local health officers of illegal discharges of toxic chemicals that are likely to cause “substantial injury to the public health or safety.”

While there was considerable debate over the meaning of that requirement, officials with state and regional water quality boards and the Department of Health Services’ toxic substances control division have complied by delivering long lists of hazardous sites to local authorities in each of the state’s 58 counties.

Review of Requirements

Health and welfare deputy Warriner said the Administration is conducting a careful review of the legal requirements of the initiative. The Health and Welfare Agency, he said, would be issuing a series of legal interpretations that can be used by industry to plan ahead for a future under Proposition 65.

Warning requirements will go into effect 12 months after the governor publishes the first list of toxic chemicals. Limits on discharges will go into effect several months later, in November, 1988. Violators will be subject to civil fines of up to $2,500 per violation. If government prosecutors fail to take action, private citizens will be able to file suits of their own and can collect 25% of the fines assessed in a successful action.

Health services director Kizer noted that the effects of alcohol on the unborn child have been known for centuries. But it was in 1973 that physicians at the University of Washington School of Medicine, David W. Smith and Kenneth Lyons Jones, formally identified the “fetal alcohol syndrome”--a combination of retardation and birth defects seen largely among the children of alcoholic women. The affected infants are distinctive in appearance: they have small heads, small eyes, short noses, and long, smooth upper lips.

Jones, now an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, estimates that the syndrome strikes from one to two children in every 1,000 live births--a figure that would make the disorder second only to Downs syndrome as a cause of retardation. That would mean that as many as 1,000 syndrome babies are born in California each year.

The syndrome is the only leading cause of retardation that is “completely preventable if people were only educated about the drug.”

Jones acknowledged the controversy over the effects of low levels of alcohol on the development of the unborn child. Some researchers have reported effects among women who drank only occasionally. “What may be safe for one woman’s fetus may be devastating for another’s,” said Jones, who is currently studying the effects of binge drinking on the fetus. “That is the problem. We don’t know who.”