Higher alcohol prices could curb health-care, crime costs, report says

Higher alcohol prices may help curb heavy drinking and lower associated violence and health-care costs in Canada, according to a new report from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.

The report recommends hiking minimum prices for booze in some provinces and implementing minimums where there are none, like in Alberta liquor stores. The author of the report hopes that government uses liquor prices to affect social factors, like health and crime.

“What we’re saying is looking at this lever and its potential for affecting heavy consumption, let’s start using this to deal with health and social problems,” said Gerald Thomas, senior policy analyst with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.

The new study from the centre calls for three key changes to policies nationwide: index prices to inflation, base pricing on alcohol content, and implement or increase minimum prices.

“The price changes that we’re talking about won’t even touch the mainstream products,” said Thomas.

The report suggests that a 10 per cent increase in the minimum price of alcohol would result in a 4.4 per cent drop in consumption focused in the areas of heavy users. A study in Saskatchewan showed an even more dramatic decline, particularly in cheaper alcohol.

“Heavier, riskier drinkers gravitate towards cheaper alcohol. Let’s go down to that lower level, let’s raise the price a little bit to affect consumption,” said Thomas.

Alcohol-related crimes cost about $3 billion annually nationwide in 2002, according to the report. Direct health-care costs related to alcohol over the same period cost about $3.3 billion.

Crime and violence prevention expert Irvin Waller notes that alcohol is a factor in many violent incidents.

“We’re not doing badly, but you can still, if you map assaults, you’ll see them clustered around bars — the high-violence cities have very heavy use of alcohol,” said Waller. He noted that increasing the price of alcohol would not be his first choice, but rather better education.

“Much better stuff in schools and with parents to delay when people use alcohol, that would be important — (as well as) making people much more aware of not only the health consequences of excessive use of alcohol but the violence consequences.”

The Saskatchewan experiment demonstrated that a 10 per cent increase in minimum liquor prices can have an effect on consumption across the board. The study, authored by Tim Stockwell of the University of Victoria and published in the October 2012 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, noted that the increase resulted in a cumulative decrease of 8.43 per cent in alcohol consumption.

“The evidence is very clear — you increase the price, deaths from liver cirrhosis go down, deaths from all alcohol-related causes go down — it’s very, very clear,” said Stockwell, who said a public perception that raising the minimum price won’t decrease consumption is “completely wrong.”

Most of the decrease was concentrated in high-strength beer and wine, with a 22 per cent drop in consumption of beers that have an alcohol content of over 6.5 per cent. The decrease in alcohol unit sales was matched by an increase in dollar sales, which meant an increase in government revenue.

“It’s probably the easiest and most effective way to reduce consumption,” said Thomas. “Think of it this way — you can spend tens of millions of dollars over a couple of decades to change cultural norms through education or you can shift a pricing variable and reduce consumption by 8 million beers in one year.”

Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Tim Alamenciak