By DR. RICHARD SCRIBNER

When we as a nation are busy patting ourselves on the back over the slight drop in illegal hard drug use by our teen-agers that recent studies indicate has occurred, we might want to save some energy for dealing with the growing problem Louisiana youth have with America’s number-one killer of youth – alcohol.

Not only are they taking their first drinks younger and younger (one study showed 12 was the most common age for getting drunk for the first time), but our teens are showing a distressing tendency for the most dangerous form of drinking, binge drinking, as frequent reports of youth deaths from alcohol overdoses confirm.

If underage drinking is ever really going to be brought under control, there is another weapon we ought to consider, one that experience in other states demonstrates will successfully reduce teen-age alcohol consumption while simultaneously generating additional revenues to deal with the results of alcohol abuse: increasing the tax on booze consumption.

Or maybe it ought to be thought of not as a new tax, but as a “user’s fee.” After all, no one is forced to drink booze. When I choose to buy a bottle of beer after work at a neighborhood bar, I know ahead of time that a small extra cost has been tacked on to the price of my drink to help pay for police efforts to keep drunks from killing themselves and others, either in card or at home, for paramedics to get people injured in alcohol-related accidents to the hospital, for doctors to keep drunks and those injured by drunks alive, and for treatment specialists to keep drunks alcohol-free. It is my free choice to go ahead with that beer or (if I refuse to pay that added “user fee”) to stroll home, drier but slightly more solvent.

Raising the excise tax on liquor is an approach to reducing consumption and covering budget deficits that is building steam around the country. It makes sense because it kills two birds with one stone, reducing state budget deficits and while reducing youth alcohol consumption. In California, the legislature is debating imposing a 5-cent per drink “fee” on all alcoholic beverages, circumventing with semantics that state’s requirement that any new taxes have to be submitted for voter approval. In Pittsburgh, the city council recently OK’d a 10 percent increase in the alcohol tax to finance emergency hospital care blamed on accidents, injuries and diseases caused by liquor consumption.

We cannot continue to allow the liquor lobbyists in Louisiana to hold state legislators hostage. Louisiana legislators are afraid of the power of lobbyists to fund campaigns of political rivals. Some legislators believe that to stay in office, they must do the bidding of the lobbyists, which, among other things, involves covering budget deficits with taxes on individuals – sales taxes and income taxes – rather than the alcohol industry – alcohol excise taxes. The sad irony being that the revenues raised are used to address problems created by alcohol in the areas of health care, public safety and emergency services. We have basically uncoupled the cart from the horse. No longer are the costs associated with alcohol use and abuse linked to the price of the product. Instead, Louisiana taxpayers subsidize the industry that is killing their kids.

Consider this: the current tax on a can of beer has been roughly 3 cents since 1948 when a can of beer cost less than 15 cents. Today, the tax is still 3 cents on a can of beer, yet the cost of that beer is now 80 cents. Legislators in 1948 knew the costs associated with alcohol use and taxed the product appropriately. Responsible leadership owes it to Louisiana taxpayers and their children to link the price of alcohol to the costs caused by alcohol abuse.

DR. RICHARD SCRIBNER of Mandeville is associated with LSU Medical School in New Orleans.