More drinking, more harm

Stockwell. Photo: Diana Nethercott

By Maria Lironi

British Columbians are drinking more than ever. That’s just one of the new findings coming out of UVic’s Centre for Addictions Research (CARBC).
Alcohol use has been rising in BC for almost a decade and twice as fast as in the rest of Canada. Since 2002, on average, BC drinkers aged 15 and up increased their consumption of alcohol from 475 to 525 standard drinks per year. Recorded liver cirrhosis deaths, most of which are caused by alcohol, have increased 39 per cent over the same period, while total alcohol-related deaths in BC are now approaching 2,000 per year.

Rates of alcohol and tobacco consumption and related harms tend to be higher in the north and the interior of BC, though there are more individual cases of such harm in the lower mainland where the bulk of the population resides.
CARBC is suggesting that BC’s introduction of the harmonized sales tax (HST) provides a golden opportunity to help counteract this increase in drinking and reverse recent increases in alcohol-related deaths and hospitalizations. It proposes that the average price of alcohol stay the same and prices better reflect alcohol content, and that the minimum price of alcohol should remain indexed to the cost of living.

“The BC government has a golden opportunity to reduce the many varieties of alcohol-related harm by encouraging drinkers to make healthier choices,” says CARBC Director Dr. Tim Stockwell, who co-authored the CARBC’s Alcohol Pricing, Public Health and the HST: Proposed Incentives for BC Drinkers to Make Healthy Choices.

The report, which has been shared with Premier Gordon Campbell and members of his cabinet, recommends: setting and enforcing a minimum price per standard drink and applying it to all products ($1.50 in liquor stores and $3 in bars and restaurants), altering mark-ups to decrease the price of low-alcohol-content beverages and increase the price of high-alcohol-content beverages, and indexing minimum prices and mark-ups to inflation to ensure that alcohol does not continue to become cheaper over time relative to other goods.

“The government collects liquor taxes with one hand but pays out more for the harms from alcohol misuse with the other,” says CARBC Senior Policy Analyst Dr. Gerald Thomas.
CARBC’s report is supported by international research showing that consumers of alcohol are very sensitive to price. Rather than proposing across-the-board increases in price, the report recommends targeting cheap high-strength drinks and creating incentives for producers, retailers and drinkers to, in turn, manufacture, promote and drink low-alcohol-content drinks. The BC Liquor Distribution Branch determines the price in its own liquor stores as well as the wholesale price paid by private distributors.

“We have also recommended other evidence-based prevention, policy and harm reduction strategies,” says Stockwell. “The pricing issue is critical now with the advent of HST next summer. PST on liquor is now 10 per cent versus 7 per cent for everything so the government must raise all mark-ups by 3 per cent to keep prices the same come July 1, 2010.”