Impact of Zero Tolerance Laws

According to the 2019 NSDUH survey, 27.7 percent of 18-22 year olds who are not enrolled in college full-time and 33.0% of 18-22 year old full-time college students reported binge drinking in the past month. Should society impose stricter restrictions on drugs and alcohol for younger individuals? On the one hand, drugs and alcohol harm…

Prohibition

A recently finished reading Prohibition: A Concise History by W.J. Rorabaugh.  The history is interesting throughout and concise indeed at only 133 pages.  Some interesting excerpts include: Whenever a substance is banned two things happen.  First, the price goes up, and second, the product returns in more concentrated form, or a replacement appears.  The high risk…

Capitalism and Russia’s Alcohol Problem

It turns out that capitalism was not the cause of Russia’s current (largely alcohol-related) mortality crisis.  From an NBER working paper by Bhattacharya, Gathmann, and Miller (2012): Political and economic transition is often blamed for Russia’s 40% surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994. Highlighting that increases in mortality occurred primarily among alcohol-related causes and…

Drinking in College is “Largely Positive”?

According to Marshall Poe, drinking in college has more positives than negatives. “Rowdy drinking is not the problem. It is an essential, ineradicable, and largely positive element of American college culture. The problem is students who cannot or will not engage in rowdy drinking safely, for they often harm themselves and others.” How is drinking a…

Does “Just say no” work?

Some of the biggest public health problems involve the use of drugs in alcohol.  Individuals use drugs and alcohol because they receive some psychic benefit.  However, this has a cost to their own health and often the health of others (e.g., drunk driving, increased homicide rates).  Whether or not the government should be involved in…

The Economics of Alcohol Control

I recently finished reading a very through, level-headed book analyzing the Economics of Alcohol Policy. The book is titled Paying the Tab: The costs and benefits of Alcohol Control by Philip Cook. The book focuses mostly on the costs of alcohol consumption. This is due to the fact that it is much easier to estimate…