Our tour of state government nannyism next takes us to Oregon:

Advocates of higher beer taxes said Thursday that they think most Oregonians would be willing to pay a few cents more per glass for their favorite brew to help fund alcohol addiction programs.

[...]

[S]upporters of the beer tax got into hot water with state police when they tried to hand out free beer to legislators to show them how “cheap” beer is in Oregon.

At a Capitol news conference, advocates of higher beer taxes displayed 12-packs of canned beer that sold in a grocery store for $4.99 — a low price made possible, they said, by Oregon’s low taxes.

“Cheap beer is the direct cause of our out-of-control youth alcohol abuse problems and the damage, death and violence it creates,” said Howard Scaman, an Alaska activist who’s now working to raise Oregon’s tax.

Afterward, Scaman went to deliver the 12-packs of low-end beer to legislators’ offices but was ordered to stop by Rusty Wolfe, a state police trooper assigned to the Capitol.

Wolfe said the problem with distributing beer to lawmakers’ offices was that many are staffed by interns who aren’t yet 21 years old — which could leave Scaman open to charges of furnishing minors with alcohol.

Scaman and other advocates came to the Capitol to support a bill co-sponsored by Rep. Jackie Dingfelder, D-Portland, and Sen. Bill Morrisette, D-Springfield, to boost the beer tax by as much as $33 per barrel — or 10 cents for a 12-ounce bottle.

The increase could raise an estimated $150 million for prevention and treatment of alcohol and drug addiction.

Noting the no-new-taxes environment that pervades the Capitol, the two legislators prefer to call their plan a “cost recovery fee.”

“It’s not so much a tax as an attempt to collect a long-past-due bill from the beer industry from some of the problems associated with its products,” Morrisette said.

So much material in that passage. Typical that the buffoon pushing the tax hike on Oregonians is from out of state. Sorta’ like how the Smokefree folks bus activists in from all over the country to impose their will whatever city happens to be considering a public smoking ban. “Cost recovery fee” is a sweet Orwellian turn of phrase.

Finally, to put this “Oregon’s low beer taxes equals lots of drunk teenagers killing people” meme to rest, have a look at this chart, compiled by my good friends at Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It tracks the highest BAC levels invovled in traffic fatalities of people aged 15-20 (my guess is that like other drunk driving scare statistics, it includes people involved in such crashes other than the driver, but for argument’s sake let’s take the chart at face value).

Look at the sixth column from the left. That’s the percentage of teen traffic fatalities in which the BAC involved was higher than .10 — or what statistics show to be the lowest level at which there’s significant driver impairmant. Oregon’s at 13.7%, which is the second lowest in the nation. I’d point out here that the sample sizes are very small. There were only 11 such cases in the state for the year in question. Of course, that there were only eleven such cases is probably a pretty good indicator that that Oregon is pretty far from a teen drunken driving crisis.

Thanks to Richard Gardner for the tip.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 13th, 2005 at 9:20 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Nanny State, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.