Alcohol is more harmful to society than marijuana and needs to be more strictly regulated, writes Reihan Salam
Washington - America is rushing headlong toward legalising the recreational use of marijuana. A growing majority – 54 percent as of a Pew survey released last month – favour legalisation, 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 think this is an okay development. Like Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at UCLA who is my guru on the regulation of controlled substances, I see full commercial legalisation as a terrible idea, while I think non-commercial legalisation, ideally via monopolies owned and operated by state governments, would be an improvement over the status quo.
Regardless, marijuana legalisation is coming.
One thing that is 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 as easy to get hold of as alcohol is now, 63 percent said that it would be.
Most people see marijuana’s relative harmlessness as a reason for us to regulate it 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 favour 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, 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 normally seen in wartime.
Political economist, Nicholas Eberstadt, has gone so far as to suggest 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 such as Australia and Sweden, has roughly the same living standards as Ecuador.
Great Britain has seen a huge 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 UK-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 such as Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors, which are working hand in glove with national retail chains such as Costco to make alcohol as cheap and accessible as they can. Why would I, a great lover of the free enterprise system, want alcohol 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 Legalisation: What Everyone Needs to Know, the authors estimate that at current beer prices, it costs about $5 (R52) 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-fuelled 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.
Kleiman and his colleagues, Jonathan 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 not raise alcohol taxes too? Let’s raise alcohol tax to a point just shy of where people start making illegal moonshine in their bathtubs.
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.
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