Increasing alcoholic beverage taxes is recommended to reduce excessive alcohol consumption and related harms.
E xcessive use of alcohol is the third leading cause of preventable death in the nation, 1 and it presents a public health challenge that is being approached from many directions. The serious toll that alcohol related injuries and disease impose on the population of the U.S. led the Task Force on Community Preventive Services (Task Force) to include reduction of excessive alcohol consumption and related harms as a priority topic in its earliest planning sessions. 2 The Task Force has studied and made recommendations (Table 1) on ways to reduce alcohol impaired driving and excessive alcohol consumption including interventions to regulate alcohol outlet density, maintain limits on the days on which and the hours in which alcohol can be sold, enhance enforcement of laws prohibiting sales to minors, and increase taxes on alcoholic beverages. A detailed report on the systematic review of the effectiveness of increasing alcohol taxes can be found in the accompanying article in this issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The Task Force recommends increasing taxes on the sale of alcoholic beverages, on the basis of strong evidence of the effectiveness of this policy in reducing excessive alcohol consumption and related harms. Public health effects are expected to be proportional to the size of the tax increase. In formulating this recommendation, the Task Force considered several aspects of the effects of this policy intervention. The relationship between alcohol price and overall consumption was reviewed, as was the relationship between price and individual consumption. Also reviewed were effects of alcohol prices or taxes on several alcohol related health outcomes, including motor vehicle crashes that involved alcohol impaired driving, non motor vehicle mortality outcomes and violence outcomes. The reviewed studies provided consistent evidence that increases in alcohol prices and alcohol taxes are associated with decreases in both excessive alcohol consumption and related harms. Although these effects were not restricted to a particular demographic group, there is some evidence that they are applicable to groups with a high prevalence of excessive alcohol consumption (e.g. young men) Details of the findings from these studies are provided in the accompanying article. Decision makers can use this recommendation to support increases in alcohol taxes as a means of reducing adverse health outcomes related to excessive alcohol consumption. Most of the studies in the systematic review, which used price elasticity as an indicator of the relationship between alcohol taxes and consumption, found that consumption is responsive to
American journal of preventive medicine