Pubdate: Sun, 01 Jun 2014
Source: Roanoke Times (VA)
Copyright: 2014 Roanoke Times
Contact:  http://www.roanoke.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/368
Author: Reihan Salam
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."

Bring back Prohibition

America is rushing headlong toward legalizing the recreational use of 
marijuana. A growing majority - 54 percent as of a Pew survey 
released in April - 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. 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 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.

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 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 teen-agers. 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 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