As pubs dried up, restaurants closed their doors, and people tried to avoid supermarkets due to COVID-19, Big Alcohol leapt online like never before. Soon, people were buying booze directly delivered to their door from producers in unprecedented quantities. “To the extent that the relaxed policy environment has boosted sales, alcohol producers and off-premise retailers are actually benefiting from the present crisis,” experts said at the time. In England, the combination of vastly increased direct-to-consumer deliveries, reduced addiction-treatment capacity, and despair amid lockdown has already been shown to have deadly results. In 2020, alcohol deaths rose 20 percent from 2019 — reaching almost 7,500 fatalities.

“Alcohol is only becoming more ubiquitous with every social crisis,” writes James Wilt in his new book Drinking Up the Revolution. Big Alcohol’s unquenchable profit-seeking shows no sign of letting up at a time of “skyrocketing consumption around the world” that already sees three million die grim deaths every year in a snowballing global crisis of alcohol-related harms. As worldwide consumption of alcohol soared 70 percent over the last three decades — far outpacing population growth — the industry continues to probe aggressively into untapped markets to increase sales. It is often the poorest who feel the brunt of it all, since alcohol deaths can be five times more likely in deprived areas.

“Multinational giants are quickly expanding their reach into the Global South despite extreme underdevelopment, with low labor costs and weak industry restrictions combining for potentially huge profit margins,” Wilt inveighs. “And as the industry demonstrated throughout COVID-19, social crises are ideal situations for further deregulation and increased profiteering, leveraging people’s declining material conditions and mental health to sell even greater volumes of alcohol.”