No Drink Tax

The World Health Organization has set its sights on your pint glass. It has decided that alcohol belongs alongside AIDS and influenza as a critical global medical issue, and that combating alcohol abuse requires harsh new restrictions on even the most moderate of drinkers.

Last month, representatives from countries around the world voted on a resolution to formally endorse the recommendations below as part of WHO’s “global strategy to reduce the harmful use of alcohol.”

The prescription includes a regimen of higher taxes; a low legal limit for drivers; restricted availability of beer, wine and spirits; more police roadblocks; giving police power to force all drivers to take Breathalyzer tests; and the elimination of drink promotions. These are draconian policy recommendations that would impact the vast majority of American adults.

WHO wants to radically raise the price of alcohol through higher taxes even though most people—more than 90 percent of the consuming public, according to data from the National Institutes of Health—are responsible drinkers. Other WHO recommendations are shockingly intrusive, like “random breath-testing.” This provision would give police the power to force all drivers to submit to Breathalyzer tests without probable cause at sobriety checkpoints.

The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches was nice while it lasted.

WHO doesn’t even want you to think about consuming alcohol. WHO’s options are so overly broad that television ads for beer conceivably would be verboten under the new regime.

What’s driving activists? Some see the behavior of a small subset of problem drinkers as such a pervasive problem that heavy-handed restrictions are justified. Others are modern day prohibitionists. Both are misguided.

They’re ignoring alcohol’s positive effects. As Harvard has noted, “for most moderate drinkers, alcohol has overall health benefits.” WHO’s changes would also wreak havoc on America’s still-struggling economy: Higher taxes and more onerous police restrictions would cost thousands of jobs.

Lowering the legal blood alcohol count misses the forest for the trees. The average for a drunk driver killed in an accident in 2008 was .19. That’s more than twice the current legal limit. Lowering it will do nothing to address the problem of hard-core drunk drivers.

This brings us to the biggest problem with WHO’s plan: its failure to differentiate between responsible drinkers and dangerous alcoholics. The overwhelming majority of Americans who drink do so responsibly. Alcohol abuse, while serious, isn’t an issue for an agency that should be concerning itself with contagious diseases.

Let’s hope the United States is smart enough to reject these reforms on behalf of the more than 120 million Americans who enjoy alcohol responsibly.

Sarah Longwell is the managing director of the American Beverage Institute in Washington, D. C.