Years ago, when I worked in an alcohol policy advocacy organization, we hired an administrative assistant with a history of alcohol dependence. After a week surrounded by alcohol products, advertising and marketing examples, she quit—she found it too difficult to maintain her recovery in the face of so many alcohol ‘cues’. The Hicks et al. study brought this example to mind, because the study suggests that people with high ‘alcohol-related approach motivation’ will suffer from a narrowing of their scope of perceptual attention in the face of alcohol cues [1]. While alcohol myopia theory has long suggested a narrowing of the ability to process contextual information as a result of heavy alcohol consumption, this is the first study to suggest a similar constriction in response to alcohol cues. The key question, then, is what are the implications of the Hicks et al. study? First, it is a single study (or pair of studies), and there will need to be much more investigation of this phenomenon. For instance, if perceptions are constricted in response to alcohol cues, which perceptions are these? Are people less likely to assess the danger in a situation? Might the presence of alcohol cues, for instance, render females less likely to be able to adopt precautionary practices regarding sexual assault, even in the absence of actual alcohol consumption? Might seeing an alcohol billboard on a highway impair a heavy drinker's ability to drive safely, again even in the absence of any alcohol consumption? Does the constriction of perception vary with age? For underage drinkers, might this constriction of perception also include failure to assess long-term consequences of drinking? We already know that teens with alcohol use disorders show greater brain activation in response to alcohol advertisements than non-drinking young people [2]. In addition to brain activation, might these teens also be at higher risk of continued heavy drinking when exposed to alcohol cues because their narrowed field of perception does not include ‘informational access to information that might inhibit the decision to imbibe’? Secondly, as these questions make clear, implications of Hicks et al. are highly speculative at this point. From the perspective of recovering adults, this research seems to suggest that, as our employee and doubtless many others have found, successful recovery may require avoiding alcohol cues, difficult as that may be in many contemporary neighborhoods and settings. The research certainly suggests that parents who believe their young person may have an alcohol problem should try to eliminate such cues (posters, alcohol-branded merchandise, etc.) from their immediate environment. This seems hardly more than common sense. It is possible that this line of research could eventually support the restriction of alcohol cues such as alcohol advertising or product placement in settings likely to be populated by young or underage drinkers, such as college campuses or entertainment programming (live or electronic) with disproportionately youthful audiences. Efforts to restrict alcohol advertising in college newspapers in the United States, for instance, are currently the subject of controversy in the courts [3]. However, if it is to help such policies to withstand the scrutiny of most public policy processes, the research will need to be replicated and more specific implications of these attention deficits explored. These findings, as they currently stand, may confirm our former employee's personal experience, but the authors are correct in noting that ‘a considerable amount of further study’ will be needed, not just, as they point out, to understand the dynamics and behavioral implications of this research, but also for us to have a clear view of the public policy implications of their findings. None.