Pubdate: Mon, 02 Jun 2014
Source: Minneapolis Star-Tribune (MN)
Copyright: 2014 Star Tribune
Contact: http://www.startribunecompany.com/143
Website: http://www.startribune.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/266
Note: Reihan Salam, a Slate columnist, also writes for the National 
Review. He is the co-author, with Ross Douthat, of "Grand New Party: 
How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream."
Page: OP4

BRING BACK PROHIBITION (IN A SENSE) WITH DISINCENTIVES

The public senses - correctly - that marijuana poses fewer risks to 
society than alcohol does.

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. 
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division via the New York 
Times A New York City police official watched agents pour liquor into 
a sewer following a raid during the Prohibition era, around 1921. We 
often forget that Prohibition was a response to problems with alcohol 
abuse in American culture.

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."

Though it is true that I was raised in a Muslim household, it is not 
my intention to impose sharia law on you and yours.

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.

Closer to home, 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 making, moving and selling booze, but that's now changing 
thanks to big multinationals like Anheuser-Busch InBev and 
MillerCoors, 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 
cheap 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.

Then, of course, there is the fact that a higher alcohol tax would 
also raise revenue.

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.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom