Study Shows Health Benefits of Moderate Alcohol Consumption

Alcohol is a favorite target for health nannies and politicians looking to boost revenue. Excessive drinkers, they say, cost society millions or billions of dollars! Because society incurs the costs of the irresponsible minority, they assert, society has the right to try and curtail this voluntary behavior. Of course, whenever campaigners quote figures about the exact dollar-amount alcohol consumption “costs” society, they rarely include estimates of the benefits of alcohol consumption for both individuals and societies. That may have to change in the wake of a new study.

Teetotalers like those over at Alcohol Justice (formerly the Marin Institute) promote the idea of “charging for harm.” That is, they think we should increase the taxes on alcohol—charging all drinkers to pay for the “harms” of the few. The estimates for the exact dollar cost of alcohol consumption to society vary significantly, depending on the region and year. As Christopher Snowdon put it in his Wages of Sin Taxes study:

The studies that produce these figures are dominated by “costs” which are neither financial nor borne by the taxpayer. They include hypothetical estimates of the value of a life year lost, earnings forgone due to premature mortality, and expenditure by the consumer on the product itself. These figures are usually inflated, but even when they are plausible they cannot be used to justify sin taxes because these “costs” affect only the individual; they are not paid by the taxpayer.

This month the European Heart Journal published a study on the effects of alcohol consumption on the heart. As the American Council on Science and Health wrote, 

After analyzing the data, Dr. Gonçalves and colleagues reported that, compared to alcohol abstainers, men who consumed up to 7 drinks per week had a significant 20 percent reduced risk of HF. Women in that category of drinkers also had a reduced risk of HF, but only by about 5 percent.

This study provides even more evidence to the growing heap that light and moderate alcohol consumption is not only harmless for most adults, but may be beneficial to health. It is still true that excessive consumption of alcohol can have negative consequences, which is true of almost everything. But it is irresponsible for researchers to continue to ignore the benefits of responsible alcohol consumption or to suggest that total abstinence would be best for individuals or societies. Whether or not a person drinks and how much they drink should be a decision he or she makes on their own, perhaps with the advice of a physician. Certainly, it should not be up to professors, social engineers, or politicians looking to raise revenue.