In an interview on Drugs

Why have you chosen Paying the Tab? 

First of all because it involves the most important abused drug, which is alcohol. Secondarily, because it’s one of the most lucid and beautifully-written policy books I know, and because it makes a very straightforward point: which is that in the US, alcohol is far too cheap and far too loosely regulated and the resulting social costs are enormous. Cook calculates that if we double the alcohol tax, which would increase the average price of a drink by about ten per cent, that would prevent about 500 murders a year. 

But prohibitions never work. 

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. 

How many alcohol-related murders are there in the US every year? 

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. 

You’d have to be quite drunk for murdering someone to seem like a good idea. 

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.