Higher Alcohol Taxes = Lower Alcohol-Related Deaths and Crime

October 4th, 2010

In light of state elections concerning raising or lowering alcohol taxes, the American Journal of Public Health has recently published a report stating that an increase of the taxes would lower alcoholic crime, illness, and crime rates.

Should the states raise these taxes, their populations would see a lowering of drinking as well as its negative effects, the researchers state. The study goes as far as saying that doubling the state alcohol tax would result in an average of 35 percent reduction in alcohol-related deaths, 11 percent decrease in car accidents, 6 percent decrease in STDs, a 2 percent reduction in violence and a 1.4 reduction in crime.

In this case, researchers took 340 estimates from 50 pages published in scientific journals.

 

Lead researcher Alexander Wagenaar said that these findings “clearly show increasing the price of alcohol will result in significant reductions in many of the undesirable outcomes associated with drinking. Simply adjusting decades-old tax rates to account for inflation could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars in law enforcement and health care costs.”