The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported last week that the Oregon Health Authority had failed to publish the $60,000 study it commissioned, or deliver its findings to lawmakers.

After a week of scathing rebuke from Republican lawmakers and members of the beverage industry, an Oregon Health Authority leader apologized Thursday for the agency’s failure to publish a 2021 study that showed increasing beer and wine taxes would have little impact on curbing drinking among the heaviest alcohol users.

Dean Sidelinger, state health officer and epidemiologist for the Oregon Health Authority, delivered the apology to lawmakers, industry experts and other members of a task force created by the Legislature last year to study alcohol addiction and pricing.

The study was “not posted in a timely fashion, and for that I do apologize,” Sidelinger said.

The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported last week that the Health Authority had failed to publish the $60,000 study it commissioned, or deliver its findings to lawmakers, despite its relevance to ongoing discussions in Salem about whether to raise Oregon’s low taxes on beer and wine.

Sidelinger echoed a prior explanation by Deputy State Health Officer Tom Jeanne that the study was meant to inform the agency’s Rethink the Drink campaign and that its publication was sidelined as staff were responding to COVID-19 spikes in late 2021. The study should have been published then, Sidelinger said, and is posted on the agency’s website now.

“At OHA we value our transparency,” he said.

The study by researchers at ECONorthwest found that increasing Oregon’s excise tax on beer and wine could raise hundreds of millions for the state and reduce public alcohol consumption overall – but that taxes would barely reduce consumption by Oregon’s heaviest drinkers, who disproportionately drive the high societal costs of alcoholism. The Oregonian/OregonLive published a copy of the study in last week’s story revealing its existence.

Response to the study was swift and stinging. Alcohol industry groups blasted the Health Authority, arguing that it appeared the agency had intentionally buried a taxpayer-funded study because the findings contradicted efforts to raise alcohol taxes. State lawmakers called the agency’s credibility into question.

House Republican Leader Jeff Helfrich said in a statement that the Health Authority had potentially compromised the integrity of the alcohol addiction and pricing task force and said the lack of transparency raised questions about whether the agency was being upfront about other information, including data related to Measure 110, Oregon’s drug decriminalization law.

“There is no universe where OHA should have hidden this study from the public,” Helfrich said in a statement. “Their job is to make an informed recommendation to the Legislature about how to best pursue better health outcomes for Oregonians while also weighing the economic impacts.”

Sen. Minority Leader Tim Knopp, R-Bend, wrote a letter to Sejal Hathi, the Health Authority’s interim director, this week saying that the failure to publish the study was “extremely damaging to OHA’s already rocky reputation and points to a major corruption problem deep within the agency.”

Hathi took over as interim director in January and was not part of the agency in 2021 when the study was delivered.

“This unfortunate situation presents an opportunity for you, as the new leader of the agency, to root out corruption and begin the work to rebuild trust,” Knopp wrote. “It will not be an easy task, but a necessary one.”

Lawmakers and task force members have questioned whether lawmakers or special interest groups were given a copy of the study in 2021, despite the fact that it was never publicly released. Sidelinger said Thursday that the agency was in the process of determining who else had seen the study.

“While I appreciate OHA’s apology, it’s clear from remarks by OHA officials that they’ve had and used this study to inform decisions,” Danelle Romain, task force member and executive director for the Oregon Beer & Wine Distributors Association, told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an email. “It seems odd they didn’t think others could benefit from having that information, especially when considering legislation on the very issues the study examined.”

Sidelinger presented findings from the study to the task force Thursday afternoon, including details about the muted impact of excise taxes on heavy drinking.

Alcohol-related deaths have increased by a third over the past ten years, Sidelinger said and is the third leading cause of preventable death in Oregon. The ECONorthwest study found that alcohol abuse cost Oregon about $4.8 billion dollars in 2019, about half of which was shouldered by taxpayers.

Aaron Sarnoff-Wood, task force member and co-founder of 2 Towns Ciderhouse, said the ECONorthwest study contained vital information for the task force.

“I’m appreciative that it is now available online and I’m sorry that it took a public records request to make it public,” he said. “For future work with this task force I think transparency is of the utmost importance so that both sides of this conversation can move forward and trust one another that they are both delivering a full picture.”