Don Surber beat me to blogging about this lovely federally-funded conference hosted by a group called the California Council on Alcohol Policy, whereby a bunch of anti-alcohol activists are headed to a sunny San Diego resort to discuss how to make it more difficult for you and I to have a drink (I wonder if they’ll be drinking?).

This group seems rather proud of helping pass, and plans to continue pushing, increases in alcohol excise taxes. Typically, excise taxes are pushed on the argument that alcohol causes negative externalities–that it leads to things like wife-beating, drunk driving, and hooking up with ugly chicks.

And typically, excise tax revenues are earmarked and given out as grants to anti-alcohol organizations and programs, allegedly to offset or minimize those externalities. That would be organizations and programs like the California Council on Alcohol Policy, and its conference at a high-end resort in San Diego.

Where they’ll discuss ways to raise the excise taxes. And so it goes. Who knows, if they’re successful, maybe next year’s conference will be in Hawaii.

As you might guess, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is also involved.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 10:44 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.