Pubdate: Sun, 01 Jun 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Reihan Salam, Slate
Page: 1D

A RETURN TO PROHIBITION, OR AT LEAST A PROHIBITIVE ALCOHOL TAX

America is rushing headlong toward legalizing the recreational use of
marijuana. A growing majority - 54 percent as of a Pew survey released
just last month-favor legalization, and an even larger majority of
millennials (69 percent) feels the same way. Colorado and Washington
are the first states to move decisively in this direction, but they
won't be the last.

I basically think this is an OK development. Like Mark Kleiman, a
public policy professor at UCLA who is my guru on the regulation of
controlled substances, I see full commercial legalization as a truly
terrible idea, while I think noncommercial legalization, ideally via
monopolies owned and operated by state governments, would be an
improvement over the status quo. Regardless, marijuana legalization is
coming, one way or another.

One thing that is really striking about the new Pew data is that 69
percent of Americans believe, correctly, that alcohol is more harmful
to society than marijuana. When asked if alcohol would still be more
harmful to society than marijuana if marijuana were just as easy to
get hold of as alcohol is now, 63 percent said that yes, it would be.

Most people see marijuana's relative harmlessness as a reason for us
to regulate marijuana as lightly as we regulate alcohol. I see things
differently. The fact that alcohol is more harmful to society than
marijuana is a reason to regulate alcohol more stringently than we
regulate marijuana. In other words, let's ease up on marijuana
prohibition and ramp up good old-fashioned alcohol prohibition. More
precisely, I favor something like what the libertarian journalist Greg
Beato calls, and not in a nice way, "Prohibition Lite."

As someone who came to drinking late in life, I still marvel at its
disinhibiting effects and I genuinely appreciate the good it can do
by, essentially, helping awkward people have fun. I also think there
is much to be said for psychoactive substances like MDMA, or Molly,
which have enormous therapeutic potential.

But alcohol is crazily dangerous, and it needs to be more tightly
controlled. Everyone knows that Prohibition was a disaster. What most
of us forget is that the movement for Prohibition arose because
alcohol abuse actually was destroying American society in the first
decades of the 20th century, and the strictly regulated
post-Prohibition alcohol market was shaped by still-fresh memories of
the pre-Prohibition era.

For a nightmare vision of where heavy drinking can lead a society,
consider Russia, where the pervasiveness of binge drinking contributes
to an epidemic of cardiovascular disease and a death rate from fatal
injuries that you'd normally see in wartime. Political economist
Nicholas Eberstadt has gone so far as to suggest that drunkenness is a
key reason why Russia, a country with universal literacy and a level
of educational attainment that is (technically) in the same ballpark
as countries like Australia and Sweden, has roughly the same living
standards as Ecuador.

Great Britain has seen a staggering increase in alcohol consumption
since the 1990s, much of it among teenagers. Tim Heffernan, writing in
the Washington Monthly, has attributed Britain's binge-drinking crisis
to its laissez-faire alcohol market, which has allowed for the
vertical integration of the liquor business.

America has been shielded from U.K.-style liquor conglomerates by
those post-Prohibition regulations that inflate the cost of booze, but
that's now changing thanks to big multinationals like Anheuser-Busch
InBev and Miller-Coors, which are working hand in glove with national
retail chains like Costco to make alcohol as cheap and accessible as
they can.

Why would I, a great lover of the free enterprise system, want the
alcohol market to be more heavily regulated? Precisely because I'm a
believer in the power of the profit motive, I understand how deadly it
can be when the product being sold is intoxication. For-profit
businesses exist to increase sales. The most straightforward way to do
that is not to encourage everyone to drink moderately, but to focus on
the small minority of people who drink the most. That is exactly what
liquor companies do, and they'll do more of it if we let Big Liquor
have its way.

In "Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know," the authors
estimate that at current beer prices, it costs about $5 to $10 to get
drunk, or a dollar or two per drunken hour. To get a sense of what
the world would look like if that price fell significantly, go to a
typical town square in England on a weekend night, where
alcohol-fueled violence is rampant, or to Russia, where the ruling
class has used vodka as a tool to keep the population drunk, passive
and stupid for generations.

We shouldn't be satisfied with keeping the per dollar cost of getting
drunk where it is today. We should make it higher. Much higher.
Kleiman and his colleagues Jonathan P. Caulkins and Angela Hawken have
suggested tripling the federal alcohol tax from 10 cents a drink to 30
cents a drink, an increase that they estimate would prevent 6 percent
of homicides and 6 percent of motor vehicle deaths, thus sparing 3,000
lives (1,000 from the drop in homicides, 2,000 from safer highways)
every year.

Charging two-drink-per-day drinkers an extra $12 per month seems like
a laughably small price to pay to deter binge drinking. If you're
going to tax tanning beds and sugary soft drinks, why on earth
wouldn't you raise alcohol taxes too? If anything, 30 cents a drink
isn't high enough. Let's raise the alcohol tax to a point just shy of
where large numbers of people will start making illegal moonshine in
their bathtubs.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt