Cheap booze can lead to more deaths

...Or so a study has come to believe. In a study focusing on the state of Alaska, Dr. Alexander Wagenaar, a professor at the University of Florida's Department of Epidemiology and Health Policy Research, concluded that while higher taxes on alcohol can make a night out more expensive, it can also save lives.

Based on the idea that high taxes prevent some drinkers from perhaps over-buying, the study, which spanned nearly three decades is fairly decisive. And looking at all that information caused each researcher to develop a keen eye when examining the state's death certificates from 1976, when the study began, until its completion in 2004. By tracking the number of deaths, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded study showed the relationship between high alcohol tax years compared to low years. The the results were startling.

Wagenaar and his co-authors compiled the number of alcohol-related deaths like alcohol poisoning and alcoholic liver disease, and deaths linked to alcohol, such as cirrhosis and chronic pancreatitis, displaying a clear relationship between price paid and the ultimate price paid. Regardless of the study's exclusions of deaths caused by alcohol-related car accidents or violence.

And Alaska isn't the only place taking notice of the alcohol link with death and taxes. Researches in Finland discovered similar results by examining the taxed alcohol conundrum. Along with that other researchers have taken this study to cigarette smoking. "When the excise tax on tobacco went up, consumption went down and the diseases associated with tobacco also went down," Wagenaar said to CNN. "Now, with the current study, we're finding the same thing for alcohol. Simply adjusting taxes has quite a noticeable rate on alcohol deaths. They parallel each other quite a bit." The correlation isn't too startling, but the numbers are.