Mark Kleiman wants to raise the alcohol tax:
Tripling the alcohol tax would, in addition to the revenue it brought in, reduce violent crime and auto fatalities by something like 5% each: that’s about 800 fewer murders, 10,000 fewer rapes, and 1700 people not killed on the highways. The total impact on health is harder to compute, but heavy drinking kills about 100,000 people a year; if tripling the tax, which would raise the price by about 20%, led to a 10% reduction in volume, that would certainly show up in morbidity and mortality statistics, and in health-care costs.
2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan