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Liquor Consumption Rises as Cigarette Smoking Falls

Published: 2010-12-20    Views:99 reads

Raising cigarette taxes has the unwanted effect of increasing alcohol consumption, even to the level of binge and heavy drinking, according to a story by Bruce Jancin for Internal Medicine News.

This relationship is an example of what economists call a cross-price or substitution effect. And it was something policy makers needed to be cognizant of, said Deborah L. McLellan, of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association.

McLellan had analyzed six years of cross-sectional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's annual Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System surveys carried out in the years 2001-2006. Interviews were conducted with 1,323,758 adults living in nearly every state of the US.

Her multivariate logistic regression analysis concluded that for every one dollar increase in the price of a pack of cigarettes, the ranks of current smokers dropped by five per cent.

But the analysis showed also that a one dollar per pack price increase was associated with a 29 per cent increase in the chance of having consumed alcohol during the past month, a 12 per cent increase in binge drinking, and a 10 per cent increase in heavy drinking, defined in the study as more than one drink per day in women and more than two in men.

"I want to be clear that the message here is not, 'Let's stop increasing cigarette taxes'," said McLellan. "That's not my message at all. But this study is contributing to other literature out there that's finding there are substitution effects, so advocates and policy makers and indeed researchers need to prepare for some of these unintended consequences of tobacco taxation policy."

Source from:Tobacco Reporter
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