Re: Why economists should like booze

As a research scientist in epidemiology and health economics, with a focus on alcohol and other substances, I found your article comparing alcohol non-users to free-riders to be light on fact and heavy on opining for a bygone, Mad Men–like era, where creativity apparently flowed aplenty from three stiff gins at lunch.

In truth, it’s the reverse: People who drink alcohol and, especially, alcohol producers are the ones given the free lunch. In Canada, this subsidy stretches to CAD$6.4 billion each year, with public revenues of $13.3 billion more than offset by socially incurred losses of $19.7 billion for health care, criminal justice and economic loss of production costs caused by alcohol use.

Your article comes strong out of the gate by explaining how anyone drinking less can expect better health and maybe improved sleep and weight loss, to boot. As an author of Canada’s new national drinking guidelines, I agree wholeheartedly.

Your piece variously portrays alcohol as a cure-all for reduced innovation and paying full price for a restaurant meal. The latter may even have some sense, if you forget that low- and non-alcoholic drinks hold much of the profit margins of booze, but none of the addictive, carcinogenic or lost productivity effects.

But near the line, you ask us to call you old-fashioned. That we can do. Wishful for generations past, your misplaced optimism about alcohol in the face of mounting evidence is more Panglossian than realist.

Adam Sherk, PhD
Senior Scientist, Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction
Adjunct A/Professor, School of Public Health and Social Policy, University of Victoria
Victoria, Canada