Paying the Tab

"Prohibitions do work: that’s why there’s less cocaine abuse than there is alcohol abuse. But badly implemented prohibitions can be terribly expensive. But Cook isn’t talking about making alcohol unaffordable. He is just talking about raising the price a little so that people would drink a little less. The people who would use less alcohol would be two groups – people with not much money, like teenagers, and people who drink a lot. It would have very little impact on the ordinary drinker. Somebody who has a drink a day would end up paying $35 a year in tax – he’d barely notice it. But somebody who has five drinks a day would notice it. There are about 16,000 murders a year and in more than half of them the victim or the perpetrator or both are drunk. Murdering someone generally doesn’t seem like a very good idea unless you’re drunk. No. You could be a little bit drunk and insult somebody who would then kill you. But also you could be a little bit drunk and get into a fight where you didn’t intend to kill the other guy but you did. One third of all the homicides in the United States are committed either in a bar or within 50 feet of the door."