As all corporate communicators know, there are times when you have a better chance of getting your message into the media and, more importantly, having it noticed. And there are times to put out bad news. For example, Washington politicians and corporate officials put out bad news late on Friday afternoons because no one reads Saturday morning papers and viewership is way down on TV and digital media on Friday afternoon and late Friday.
Same thing is true at this point in the summer. We just about at the point where kids will be returning to school, so a lot of families are at the beach or heading to the beach. Congress is rushing to head home. In short, there’s going to be little “hard” news. So it’s a great time to get better play for a story such as one that appeared in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and was picked up by newspapers in Minnesota.
The study concludes that the “societal cost of alcohol use in Minnesota in 2019 was nearly $8 billion or $1,383 per resident.” That works out, the study tells us, to $2.86 per drink. It notes that “excessive drinking is the most harmful, incurring substantial costs owing to premature death, injury and violence, crime, property damage, disease, and lost productivity. Binge drinking, the costliest form of alcohol consumption, continues at high rates. A recent study estimated that over 17% of U.S. adults self-reported binge drinking weekly and consumed an average of 7 drinks per binge drinking episode.
It goes on the promote “evidence-based prevention strategies to reduce alcohol use include increased alcohol taxes, enhanced enforcement of laws prohibiting sales to minors, and electronic screening and brief intervention.”
One of the points of this study is that “the economic burden from excessive alcohol use for state and local governments far exceeded the alcohol tax revenue collected. In 2019, Minnesota collected $97,716,000 in liquor gross receipt taxes (2.5% of sales) and $93,553,000 from alcoholic beverage taxes (also called excise taxes) for a total of just over $190 million. This tax revenue is about 10% of the costs estimated to be borne by the state and local governments in Minnesota owing to excessive alcohol use. ” This sort of calculation, of course, is used to justify attempts to raise bev/al taxes.
What we found particularly interesting was the statement, buried at the bottom of the study, that adult rates of alcohol use and binge drinking have increased nationwide over the past decade, which would seem to be an attempt by antialcohol forces to respond to the demonstrated dramatic drop in underage consumption over the past 40 years.