Eleven years ago, two days before Christmas, my 24-year-old brother, who was a university graduate and former law student, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. After a decade of hard and continuous drinking interspersed with addiction and mental health treatment, he could not sustain his recovery. His suicide came on the heels of my mother’s death a year before, and just weeks later, my grandfather died in a car accident. My family’s holidays would never be the same.
Like so many others who survived the loss of someone dear from the chaos of severe substance use disorder (SUD), I am too familiar with unspeakable grief. But I have found meaning through it and purpose in passing that on.
I was a medical resident when I dropped my brother off at an addiction treatment facility for the first time. Later, I became an addiction specialist physician, focusing on treating people with SUD and helping them manage their disease and find remission and recovery. My work has taught me something important: To help stop the addiction crisis that has brought so much sorrow to families like mine, policymakers must prioritize prevention at all levels and support evidence-based prevention initiatives — including raising federal excise taxes on alcohol.
I’ll echo other comments here that simply raising taxes does not seem like a successful long-term intervention strategy in a vacuum—and I don’t think the author intended for it to come across this way, though it kind of did. The availability of mental health services and a number of societal ills are what need to be addressed.
I’ll also add that in the same period when the author discusses a decrease in alcohol-related injury deaths, post-1991, there was an increase in illicit drug use as illustrated in this National Institute on Drug Abuse chart. While the increased trend in the use of any illicit drug is largely driven by marijuana in this chart, you can see there are also moderate increases for other drugs like LSD, cocaine, and later heroin.
Did the sudden availability of certain other drugs plus the higher cost barriers to obtaining alcohol create an environment that led to more drug abuse and other drug-related deaths? I don’t know, I’m not a researcher, but it’s a question.