Uncorking neo-Prohibition:

...Their public education proposals, for example, come from studies that question why groups with traditionally few concerns over alcohol - Jews, Italians, and Orientals - are now experiencing an increase in alcohol-abuse problems...

...A swing back of public opinion, away from complete liberalization and towards a reasonable degree of alcohol control, has been noted in recent years," concludes a recent survey of eighty nations done by the World Health Organization and Canada's Addiction Research Foundation...

...We haven't come out publicly on these control of consumption reports, but Pitman's study is the one that coincides with our views...

...And these announcements teach specific habits to control consumption: enjoy alcohol with meals, at social occasions, and when with others, but do not drink when alone, or in reaction to stress or before driving...

...These rates mean a boost in the retail cost of a certain alcoholic beverage by say 30 percent could drop its consumption in the U.S...

...Supporters explain they are not preaching morality but an approach based on new knowledge...

...workers in the Treasury Department predict between - 1.0 to -0.3...

...The Finnish Parliament has called for increased taxes on all alcohol beverages...

...Those against cited their belief that a higher cost would have no effect on excessive drinking and also discriminated against poor people...

...Paul Gavaghan of the liquor industry's trade association agrees...

...Consumers will resist large price changes, predicts Frederick Meister, president of the liquor industry's trade association...

...Other foes include the beer and wine industries, family-owned liquor stores, and those hostile on principle to government interference with private behavior...

...DRINKING BUT NOT DRUNKENNESS Uncorking neo-Prohibition ALLAN LUKS FOR the first time since Prohibition's repeal in 1933, a federally funded study has called on Washington to pass laws that would significantly reduce how much alcohol Americans drink...

...The new proposals clearly educate people to drink less: They offer intensive awareness campaigns, aimed especially at the young, which emphasize that intoxication is not just to be avoided, but is also an embarrassment to the drinker, his family, and friends...

...by 30,15, or 9 percent...

...7 percent and deaths by cirrhosis of the liver by .9 percent...

...Per drink costs would rise by far higher percentages as bars mark up these tax increases...

...The new proposals suggest that campaigns in the media and schools can teach appropriate times to drink while attaching strongly negative values to anyone who became intoxicated...

...will become a major cornerstone of the alcohol policy in many countries, especially in Scandinavia...

...A STRONG DISPUTE also surrounds the other major thrust of neo-Prohibition: significantly increasing alcohol taxes as a way to pressure people to stop drinking abusively...

...ntiful except synthetic gin...

...Philip Cook, at the Institute for Public Policy Studies at Duke University, suggests an elasticity of increased price to decreased consumption of - 1.0 or less...

...Professor Cook believes that for every 1 percent increase in retail price, auto deaths would drop by...

...But with this shadow fading, alcohol abuse gaining attention, and proposals calling for stiff taxes being raised in other nations, the high-tax strategy should be considered, the National Research Council's panel concluded...

...Equal tax rates, based on the amount of alcohol in each drink, mean a 12-ounce, 50-cent can of beer would jump to about 77 cents, a hike of 54 percent, and a present $5.00 bottle of wine would go to around $6.50, a 30 percent rise...

...supporters visualize this new sentiment not only growing eventually into an identifiable social movement but also a political force whose program would demand heavy taxes on luxury spending, advocate a more moderate lifestyle generally, and confront big business over its responsibility for social ills...

...The 1982 annual meeting of the industry's trade association alerted members to the new "anti-alcohol movement...

...Might Americans offset higher prices by simply switching to less expensive alcoholic beverages...

...A too high tax could produce a threat that was not as serious during Prohibition - pricing heavy drinkers into using other available mood-altering drugs, such as amphetamines, barbiturates, and marijuana...

...Would a pricing policy aimed at eliminating alcohol abuse lead to government continually approving increases until great numbers of people were unable or unwilling to pay for a drink...

...In the next decade one can predict that this model...

...If consumption falls how would alcohol abuse be affected...

...Bitterly labeled by opponents as "neo-Prohibition," this movement to slash alcohol consumption calls for national campaigns that actually encourage drinking with meals while forthrightly stigmatizing drunkenness and dramatically hiking taxes on alcoholic beverages...

...highway fatalities jumped when taxes dropped...

...officials are reluctant to consider very large tax hikes because of government's great failure at alcohol regulation during Prohibition...

...Regulating alcohol use through taxes could reinforce existing demands for far higher taxes on cigarettes because of lung cancer and heart disease (the federal tax is 80 a pack), on highly sugared products that cause dental cavities, on artificially packed food linked to allergies and hyperactivity, and on other goods associated with health and social problems...

...To decrease the nation's highway deaths by a noticeable 25 percent would require a 35 percent price increase...

...Of the price-increase supporters, primarily women and light drinkers, more than half said they would pay up to $2 more for a bottle of liquor or wine or twelve bottles of beer...

...Sensing it could lead a great spirit of change, the Prohibition party, in the 1880s, not only fought to outlaw drinking but also had a faction that advocated a strongly populist platform, including support of income tax and free trade, abolition of convict labor, woman's suffrage, a day off each week, government ownership of railroads and utilities, government issue of money, and land grants only to actual settlers...

...The party eventually rejected this broad program for a one-theme approach...

...But will the public and legislators believe that such a hike in consumer prices - requiring greater increases in the alcohol excise tax than ever before approved - should be tried...

...The neo-Prohibition trend grows as the nation enters not only one of its worst periods of recession and unemployment, but also perhaps a permanent age of limitations...

...IFNEO-PROHIBITION'S proposals provoke a public debate in the eighties, as both opponents and supporters predict, then non-alcohol issues also might be raised...

...A French campaign has told citizens not to have more than two glasses of wine with the main meal...

...One example is the proposal that government should tax all luxuries more heavily and reduce the burden on essentials...

...A recent Trinidad study states that when taxes on rum were high, drunken driving accidents fell...

...This nation' s powerful liquor industry, which provided $6.7 billion in taxes to local, state, and federal governments in 1980 and usually can make politicians listen to its concerns, is worried...

...While such a recommendation may surprise anyone who thinks that the thirteen-year fiasco of the "noble experiment" definitively settled the matter, Alcohol and Public Policy: Beyond the Shadow of Prohibition, by a National Research Council panel, reflects a worldwide trend now starting to be felt in the U.S...

...So most Americans have less than three drinks each day, while the heavy drinkers take far more...

...A recent annual report of the distilled spirits industry notes: "Consumer prices of all food products since 1967 advanced almost twice as fast as consumer prices of whiskey...

...The retail price for a bottle of just the well-known brands of liquor ranged between $10.37 (Dewar's Scotch) and $5.65 (Seagram's Gin) in 1980, a nearly ninety percent fluctuation, and then there are far cheaper beers and wines...

...High-tax supporters link this relative price decrease to the rise in per capita alcohol consumption - from 1960 to 1973 it increased forty percent throughout the world - and that jump to the international growth in alcohol-abuse problems...

...The rationale: Throughout the world the cost of alcoholic beverages has increased far less than the price of other goods...

...Neo-Prohibition's expansion to include non-alcohol proposals under its banner would parallel Prohibition's experience...

...This research concludes that these populations always placed a strong taboo on drunkenness while demonstrating to their children that alcohol was a natural part of meals and celebrations (rather than self-medication used to relax, relieve stress, or overcome inhibitions...

...Luxury spending is "by definition the spending we can most easily forgo," John Kenneth Galbraith has argued in unsuccessful appeals to reorder taxing priorities...

...But can't government and private health agencies educate a nation in the same way these groups once taught their young...

...Advocates, on the other hand - often health professionals - are not part of a formal organization...

...A report by the National Research Council found: "We conclude that alcohol consumption and the problems caused by it respond to the price of alcoholic beverages, and we infer that the large reductions in the real cost of alcohol to consumers in recent years are likely to have exacerbated drinking problems...

...High-tax supporters respond by noting how the meat industry's sales plummeted when large cost increases combined with heightened concern about avoiding fatty foods...

...The World Health Organization has even recommended that governments go beyond merely keeping alcohol prices even with the general rate of inflation...

...the liquor industry guesses at -0.5...

...Clearly, raising the real price of alcohol, rather than preventing it from falling, would be a more effective means of reducing consumption...

...Joined to a public campaign that places a taboo on excessive consumption, highly taxed, expensive alcohol beverages, the arguments stress, will force heavy drinkers - at least, the six million among them who are not alcoholic - to drink less, reducing both their health problems and the risk of tragic accidents caused by drunkenness...

...Such an increase would raise the price of the average $7.50 bottle of liquor by about $3.30 to $ 10.80, or 44 percent...

...Americans increased their drinking by a stiff twenty-five percent in the 1960s, and have continued to drink more, though for the decade of the seventies the increase slowed to eight percent...

...The Center for Science in the Public Interest, in Washington, D.C., which works in the area of nutritional health, has called for tripling federal taxes on wine, beer, and liquor to make up for inflation, as well as hiking the rates on the first two to equal those on distilled spirits...

...Michael Beaubron, a Trinidad psychiatrist, says that if he is told the per capita income and the price of rum for any year he can accurately guess what the accidents were for that period...

...in Canada and perhaps the United States," says Dr...

...But this teaching is disappearing, the studies find, because of acculturation, the general decline of parental influence and a retreat from religious practice...

...Although the Reagan administration has discussed raising alcohol as well as cigarette excise taxes, the amount mentioned was small since the goal was now revenue rather than boosting prices to discourage consumption...

...A national awareness effort here would not expect to eliminate or even reduce alcoholism - an illness of unknown cause that leaves ten million Americans addicted to alcohol...

...Federal excise taxes of about $ 1.66 on a bottle of liquor and less than 4 cents for a bottle of wine have not been increased since 1951, although the consumer price index rose 238 percent in this time, and the beer tax of around 3.6 cents on a pint has not gone up since 1964, while the consumer price index rose 183 percent...

...But about sixteen million persons, or sixteen percent of all drinkers, are considered very heavy users who consume about half of all alcohol sold...

...Neo-Prohibition aims rather at America's ninety million other drinkers, who can enjoy alcohol but when drinking excessively risk becoming a federal statistic: Excessive drinking is involved in 70 percent of deaths from falls, 69 percent of drownings, 83 percent of fire accidents, 40 percent of fatal accidents on the job, and 50 percent of all highway fatalities which is the major killer of youth...

...An American averages about three drinks daily - whether three glasses of beer, three cocktails, or three glasses of wine...

...It is not sound tax policy to penalize the majority of alcohol consumers for the excesses of a few or the infrequent excesses of the majority.'' A poll of a representative group of Ontario's population, led by Michael Goodstadt, found two-thirds of all drinkers there would pay more "if the long-term result would be a decrease in the prevalence of alcoholism...

...David Pitman, sociology research director at Washington University in St...

...Louis, and a veteran researcher on the problems of alcohol abuse...

...This article will form part of a book, Will America Sober Up?, to be published next fall by Beacon Press...

...This opens the way for the illegal manufacture and bootlegging whose corruption waves spread so easily during Prohibition...

...Yet U.S...

...Many argue that Americans have failed to reduce their driving significantly despite the big increase in gas prices...

...This would give the Treasury an extra $25 billion yearly, the CMM estimates (about the amount the Reagan administratitil has cat health and social services...

...While neo-Prohibition's foes, evoking "1984" and Big Brother, warn against letting government regulate private behavior, Orwell's novel also worries about a society where the cost of all goods - except liquor - has risen beyond the budgets of most people and drinking is encouraged to dull awareness of this condition: "There had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms under-heated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-colored, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient - nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin...

...Washington University's Pitman, whose research has been funded by the liquor industry as well as the federal government, declares that an anti-drunkenness, moderate-drinking campaign won't work...

...Defenders argue that combined with an education campaign against intoxication of any type, high taxes could lead people away from alcohol and other drugs and to more treatable habits...

...HOW MUCH WOULD higher prices decrease excessive consumption...

...They argue that, on balance, such a large and unproven campaign should not be attempted since in addition to the chance of failure it could bring back Prohibition's worst excesses of intolerance...

...A British effort aimed at heavy-drinking families in the country's north states: "The northeast drinks more than any other area in the country and it's got more problems because of it...

...ALLAN LUKS is executive director of New York City Affiliate, Inc., of the National Council on Alcoholism...