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I actually support anything that makes alcohol harder to get, but I agree it's too soon to draw a conclusion. I would be interested in seeing if there's been a

I actually support anything that makes alcohol harder to get, but I agree it's too soon to draw a conclusion. I would be interested in seeing if there's been a decline in domestic violence and other forms of crime that have a strong historical relation with alcohol consumption. My bet is that there's no such evidence. I'm also curious to see how much variation in deaths there are year over year. Maybe 20% changes aren't uncommon, in which case this study is just picking up noise and no signal. I'm also curious why they just don't implement a tax instead of minimum pricing, that way they could take that revenue and dedicate it to alcohol-related problems, at least somewhat offsetting the alcohol's cost to society.

Symbiote 7y ago
I think they chose this method because Scotland isn't able to change the alcohol duty; that's set by the UK to be equal everywhere.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  But it also has benefits that raising alcohol duty doesn't: supermarkets etc can't absorb it by selling for a lower price or below-cost, pubs become more competitive with supermarkets, and the highest amount of alcohol for lowest price value pack disappears in theory.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
epicureanideal 7y ago
I'd also be interested to see what the correlation is on family violence for different kinds of alcohol -- beer versus liquor versus wine for example.