There’s a lot to be said for cheap alcohol. Cheap alcohol is great for restaurant, bar, and liquor store sales. Cheap alcohol is great whether your tastes run to 18-year-old single malt or leftover Manischewitz from your best friend’s bat mitzvah. (Don’t look at me.)

In Massachusetts, where alcohol is cheap and plentiful, these are good times for drinkers. Low alcohol excise taxes make it cheaper to have a beer here than in 43 other states, and wine and spirits are cheaper here than in 33 other states. There’s just so much to like about Massachusetts. 

But now, in order to raise funds for substance abuse treatment, Boston City Council President Bill Linehan and Boston City Councilor Frank Baker have  proposed a 1-2% tax on all alcohol sales in Boston. (Some who follow Boston City Hall closely see Linehan and Baker as acting as stalking horses for Mayor Marty Walsh, who is a strong advocate for the recovery community. If the Councilors are, so what?)

The projected millions in increased revenue would come from raising the cost of alcohol most upon the people who drink the most. It’s a simple equation: the more you drink, the more you pay in alcohol taxes.

Treatment for substance abuse has finally become a political winner. One of Governor Baker’s first acts was the establishment of the  Opioid Addiction Working Group, which includes Attorney General Maura Healey who, like Governor Baker, made it a winning campaign issue. The group will submit recommendations in May on how to combat what the governor said is a “public health emergency”. He’s right: opiate overdoses in Massachusetts have tripled since 2000. There were 978 deaths from opiate overdoses here last year.

Yet just as  snow upon snow upon snow added up slowly to what would have been instantly recognizable as a single storm worthy of federal disaster relief, drink after drink after drink can add up to a long slow death as worthy of emergency status as the kind you get from a quick overdose of opiates. In fact, a lot more people are dying from alcohol than from opiates. Nationwide, one out of every 10  deaths of working age adults is related to excessive alcohol use.

There’s a lot to be said for expensive alcohol.  Tripling alcohol taxes would prevent 6% of motor vehicle deaths, or 3,000 lives, nationally. As  Mark Kleiman, Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Public Policy put it, “Price matters a lot to people who use a lot, and so it’s a very good way to regulate consumption.”

So if increasing the alcohol tax is such a good idea, why limit it to Boston? Perhaps because recent history shows a small majority of Massachusetts voters prefer not to be regulated that way, thank you very much. After the legislature passed a 6.25% tax increase on top of the excise tax in 2009, only a portion of which was designated for substance abuse treatment, voters  repealed it in a statewide referendum the following year by a  margin of 52-48.

Boston’s proposed tax can’t become law unless both the Boston City Council and the state legislature want it to. Pro-alcohol tax legislators could jump at the chance to use Boston as a laboratory to show that raising alcohol taxes doesn’t hurt alcohol-related businesses, just as naysayers were proven wrong after restaurants continued to thrive despite smoking bans.

Given all the good reasons for a higher tax on alcohol, why isn’t it easier to implement one? Maybe moderate drinkers are so happy with their cheap drinks they don’t want to hear the truth, which is that they’re paying for the cocktails heavy drinkers order after everyone else goes home. 

Excessive drinking costs $1.90 per drink in lost productivity, earnings, and shortened lifespans, according to the  Centers for Disease Control. It adds up to $224 billion per year nationwide. An extra $1.90 a drink is a lot less than the 1-2% Boston proposal.

Either way, the cost of heavy drinking must be paid. If the Boston City Council or the legislature votes against the proposal, they will have to find another way to pay the social cost. Without a fair tax on alcohol, a drink looks a lot cheaper than it is, especially when you’re buying a third, fourth, or fifth one. But think about it: everyone is paying the price of heavy drinking. So who should pay the most? The people who drink the most, or everyone else?