Rise in Deaths Spurs Effort to Raise Alcohol Taxes | Hacker News Reader

Rise in Deaths Spurs Effort to Raise Alcohol Taxes

nytimes.com

8 pointssmugma21 comments

Alcoholism - and addiction in general - is as much a symptom as it is a disease. That is, there's a root cause that triggers / manifests as addiction.

Making alcohol less accessible doesn't cure anyone. It simply kicks the can on to some other means to find relief.

Put another way, "maybe we shoild raise taxes?" is the wrong question. The better question is, "why are more and more people in so much pain that they need substances to make life bearable?" Playing the sin tax card is a nice political maneuver but it's a societal train wreck.

I agree but this discounts the harm alcoholism does to those around. It can impact the family, especially children, who which in turn develop psychological issues that alcohol is used to cope with later in life. Continuing this circular issue throughout subsequent generations. I think we can attack the root cause and prevent ongoing damage.

This meaning my comment, or the tax?

If it's the tax, yes I agree. It takes a complex issue and over-simplifies it.

If it's my comment, I'm not discounting the pain. I'm annoyed that we have a bad habit of trying to fix problems by "treating" symptoms.

I'm willing to hypothesize that there are a percentage of drinkers for whom a higher price will be a key trigger in reducing their intake, and having done so, it gives them an opportunity to find some other more healthy distraction to make life, as you say, bearable (or at least, more enjoyable). Even for myself, I'd certainly accept that if alcohol were cheaper I'd probably drink more of it and as such I'm grateful we do have quite high taxes on it here.

Or...find an even less healthier distraction. That's more likely, simply because once you're in that "network" (i.e., your friends and associates) there aren't many (any??) pointing to the door that says, "this way out." That is, when you're in that position you're 10x closer to something worse than something better.

The cool wineries, microbrews, and distilleries leap to mind when you think about alcohol in Oregon. Raising taxes would hurt sales of these small businesses that bring tourism to small towns. But by admitting alcohol taxes would harm sales we also admit it would have the desired effect of lowering consumption. This disconnect is that a tax lowers consumption across the board, but we only want to lower excess consumption. One thing that might be tried is a form of rationing. This would lower sales but still allow casual consumption to continue. Rationing would be politically unlikely to happen, but capping the size of containers and packages could have a similar effect. Rationing has happened during COVID in Pennsylvania and Australia has started monitoring consumption by taking IDs. Sweden famously had the Bratt system instead of prohibition.

The state doesn't need to do anything at all. If people are drinking themselves to death, that is within their rights.

I'm pretty concerned with how utilitarian and authoritarian our populations are getting. The state should be the last tool we reach to, and only for the meditation of severe and direct negative third party externalities (i.e. reasonable case for laws regarding drunk driving).

Technically people have a right to die by alcohol, yet there are circumstances where society has a case for intervention. Drinkers who insist on driving, alcoholic parents, and military or public servants are a few that spring to mind.

Though I imagine most such cases are already illegal. Yet if the person's goal is suicide they have other means, should alcohol become too expensive.

I addressed this point in my comment.

> The state should be the last tool we reach to, and only for the meditation of severe and direct negative third party externalities (i.e. reasonable case for laws regarding drunk driving).

> If people are drinking themselves to death, that is within their rights.

Addiction is rarely a choice. Alcohol producers should pay for the costs of the harms they cause rather than off-loading those costs onto the state.

> If people are drinking themselves to death, that is within their rights.

Not when they do this while operating heavy machinery or a motor vehicle. What approach besides policy would you take to deal with third party externalities?

From my comment

> The state should be the last tool we reach to, and only for the meditation of severe and direct negative third party externalities (i.e. reasonable case for laws regarding drunk driving).

https://archive.ph/XbkQJ

Raising prices is about the only thing that works to change behaviour.

But it needs to be tied to treatment too - there's no point making alcohol harder to get if you're not also making treatment for alcohol use disorders easier to get.

There are other ways to increase the cost of the most harmful alcohol. You could impose a minimum unit cost - this would target the industrially produced low quality booze that gets sold very cheaply, and leave the "artisinal microbrewery" drinks unaffected. See eg Scotland as an example: https://www.alcohol-focus-scotland.org.uk/news/minimum-unit-...

Often time the money from so-called sin taxes is earmarked towards treatment.

Also, a 0.25 tax on a can of beer significantly changes the price of a case of Bud Light but not so much the 4 pack of IPA that costs $15. So you don’t need carve outs that create perverse incentives / unintended consequences.

Are we so sure that it's the Bud Light drinkers that are the problem?

Not at all; it’s a good question, but it’s implied by the article.

“Budweiser in 2010 cost one-fifth of what it did in 1950 after adjusting for inflation, one study calculated, and the cheapest available liquor cost one-fifteenth the price.”

And more poignantly here: Both her parents drank heavily and died young, Ms. LaRue said, adding it made her an impassioned supporter of mental health services. She noted that her mother consumed cheap whiskey, not craft IPAs. “If a person has a drinking problem,” she said, “they’re going to find a way.”

That might be a 25-50% tax on very cheap beer. It’s a regressive tax but would likely serve its desired goals, at least reducing consumption for poorer people. Or simply push them to really cheap liquor like a handle of cheap vodka that goes for $10.

“ Last year, 2,153 residents died of causes attributed to alcohol, according to the Oregon Health Authority — more than twice the number of people killed by methamphetamines, heroin and fentanyl combined.”

The issue with alcohol in our society isn't that it's too cheap, it's that it's expected and normalised in our cultures. If we want to address alcohol deaths, we need to try to change attitudes so that abstaining is the norm.

(I acknowledge I haven't read the paywalled article)

Increasing evidence demonstrates that there is /no/ safe level of alcohol consumption, and that the benefits of e.g. resveretrol in wine were oversold several years ago (viz., the amount needed to obtain the helpful/protective effects required a consumption of a quite large amount of red wine, such that the detriment from ethanol outweighed any apparent or known benefit from other chemicals such as resveretrol).

Personally, after reflecting on the data, I have gone from 1-2 alcohol containing drinks / week to 0-1 / month.

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