When liquor companies start promoting the health benefits of cocktails, you know it’s time for the feds to get serious about enforcing laws against misleading advertising.
Unfortunately, the FDA has been falling down on the job in recent years much to the detriment of health-conscious consumers who depend on accuracy in labeling to make informed decisions.
Exhibit A: A nonprofit group known as the Non-GMO Project, which feigns to operate in the public interest while peddling deceptive marketing practices attached to narrow special interests. The most obvious example of this effort exists in the form of an orange butterfly perched on a blade of grass forming a green check mark next to the words “NON-GMO Project.” This is what appears on many products sold in grocery stores.
In reality, genetically modified organisms are the byproduct of American ingenuity in the agricultural industry. More than 100 government-funded studies have found that GMOs are every bit as safe, if not safer, than conventionally bred crops. But the Non-GMO Project has successfully burrowed itself into food and beverage companies that blithely slap labels onto their products that suggest the absence of genetically modified organisms has health benefits when it does not.
Under FDA guidelines, “GMO-Free” and “No GMOs” labels are impermissible if they include explicit or even implied health claims that non-GMO products are safer for humans and the environment. Before any health claim can be made, there must be substantial scientific agreement, according to the guidelines. But as the FDA has declined to take action against the Non-GMO Project, scam artists have become more emboldened. Smirnoff, for example, recently launched a campaign for a high-end no-GMOs vodka brand that implies that its vodka is somehow safer, healthier, and environmentally better because it doesn’t contain GMOs.
Smirnoff’s ostensible concern for health here doesn’t pass the laugh test given that alcohol (i.e. vodka) is a well-known carcinogen. Now, Drake’s Organic Spirits is jumping on the bandwagon and promoting GMO-free, “healthier” cocktail mixes. It’s a great scam selling “healthier” cocktail mix to liven up your carcinogenic alcoholic beverage. Drake’s has made the calculation that it can get away with this duplicity because, like Smirnoff, it knows the FDA is hiding and simply not going after false and misleading advertising involving misleading health claims about GMOs.
If the FDA were in search of a possible starting point to reactivate its long-dormant enforcement efforts, it could not have a better opening than what the liquor industry has offered up in terms of false and misleading advertising. We are not talking about innocent missteps. We are talking about grifters who are adept and skilled at playing up on the fears and ignorance of the marketplace. Vodka is vodka with or without GMOs.
The FDA would be on very solid ground if it got serious about pushing back against con artists. Every credible scientific, health, and safety organization and agency to study GMOs over the last 25 years (more than 250 around the globe) has concluded that GMOs are safe for both humans and the environment. This includes scientific and medical organizations like the National Academies of Science and the American Medical Association, as well as the FDA, USDA, and EPA under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
There’s another ace in the hole here. The Treasury Department’s Tax and Trade Bureau oversees liquor advertising and, theoretically, uses the FDA’s guidelines to oversee Smirnoff ads. Both agencies could take the opportunity to move decisively against Drake’s and Smirnoff’s labeling practices. But if they continue to turn a blind eye to deceptive and misleading labeling practices, this could have profound implications for consumers over time.
As it is, the Non-GMO Project makes potentially hundreds of millions of dollars a year selling food marketers its blue butterfly “GMO Free” labels based on overtly false claims about GMO health and environmental risks. But the failure of federal officials to enforce FDA guidelines will have consequences well beyond the false advertising about GMOs. We now stand on the verge of the barn door being thrown wide open to allow even more elaborate advertising grifts across the marketplace to escape exposure and penalty. Once those animals get out en masse, there will be a devil of a time rounding them up.
Kevin Mooney (@KevinMooneyDC) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. who writes for several national publications.
