This article is on the economic benefits of advancing temperance, teetotalism, and the abolition of the alcohol industry. It goes without saying that alcohol is one of the most harmful drugs plaguing people in our society. The use of alcohol distorts and damages the mind and personality of the user, both in short term and long-term ways. The use of alcohol causes a variety of physical illnesses, and produces alcoholism in a significant portion of users. Alcohol use kills 88,000 Americans a year (more than twice as many killed by opioids) and kills over 3 million people a year worldwide. Drunk driving causes hundreds of thousands of accidents and kills over 10,000 Americans a year. Nearly 200 years of research have shown that the use of alcohol contributes to increased rates of poverty, domestic abuse, neglect of children, sexual assault, and general criminal activity. While the facts of alcohol’s harmfulness to people should be enough to convince a reasonable and conscientious person that humanity would be vastly benefited from its eradication, it is important to compressively address temperance considerations.

That is why is important to address the economic dimension of this issue. The alcohol epidemic is facilitated by an alcohol industry. This industry not only produces and supplies alcohol, but uses its influence to encourage drinking and lobby for the support of government officials. This is done so that they can continue to profit from selling their products. Some of their main tactics for trying to convince politicians to support them and to ignore the harms caused by their product include trying to portray their industry as economically valuable. They portray their industry as a driver of economic activity, a creator of jobs, and a source of tax revenue, and claim that efforts to reduce drinking or restrict the sale of alcohol would hurt the economy. But their claims are deceptive and ignore the larger effects of their industry.

When one looks at the impact of alcohol industry holistically, it is seen that it actually makes our society poorer. The United States loses over 253 billion a year due to the social, medical, and economic damages of alcohol. That includes lost productivity, increased medical care costs, and various other social costs. In doing so, it has significantly slowed our country’s economic growth and resulted in less prosperous businesses, fewer jobs, and greater poverty for society at large. It also means that government social services and charities have to expend more of their limited resources on dealing with the social ills that drinking contributes to, and have to spend more of their effort preventing the growth of problems, instead of reducing them. For every dollar the government receives in taxes from the alcohol industry, the government spends three dollars covering its share of increased medical costs, with individuals paying a similar amount in their share of increased medical costs. That means the government has to actually raise your taxes or increase debt in order to deal with the social costs of the alcohol industry. This problem is made worse as the alcohol industry pays off government officials to reduce legal restrictions, create special tax breaks or the alcohol and even use your tax dollars to encourage drinking and subsidize the expansion of alcohol production. It also means that everyone’s health insurance costs are increased to cover the expense of alcohol induced illnesses. While the alcohol industry may have some economic activity and workers, its overall effects on the economy and the growth of the industry actually results in a smaller economy, with less productivity, fewer jobs, higher taxes, more debt, and more government corruption.

On the other side, moving toward creating a society where drinking has ended and alcohol industry is abolished, would actually produce a more prosperous society. The economic activity that the alcohol industry does produce is not exclusive and can be replaced. When people stop drinking and stop purchasing alcohol, the money they used to purchase it with does not disappear from the economy. Instead, these people will use it in other ways. Instead of buying beer or wine, they’ll use it to buy bread or water or shoes, or pay the cable bill, or buy their kid a toy, or put it in their savings, and so on. The companies that provide these other products and services would see an increase in business, and hire more people. By ending the use of alcohol, the hundreds of billions of wealth lost each year by the damages of alcohol use would be freed up. This wealth could be used to generate more economic activity. The social services of the government would be less costly, and thus allow it to better fulfill its functions with less financial burden. The reduced medical costs alone would more that make up for the lost tax revenue from eliminating the alcohol industry. The increased productivity and resources could also help enable our society to invest in things that could improve our lives. Things like free college could be more easily achieved. Eliminating drinking and abolishing the alcohol industry would mean creating a society that is not only better for the well-being and health of people, but one which has a better overall economy, more jobs, lower healthcare costs, less taxes/debt, and more opportunity.

Now, there are those who will rush to claim that we can’t eliminate drinking or abolish the alcohol industry. But they are wrong. Alcohol use originates as a choice and the alcohol industry exists because collective social, cultural, economic, and political activities allow it to. These things are not set in stone and they are not impervious to influence. We can make the decision to change things and go in a different direction. We can work to convince people to embrace teetotalism, we can work to create positive influences in our society, we can work to eliminate the drinking culture in society, we can change our economic and political practices to shut down the alcohol industry, and in doing we can make our society dry. At heart, we are moral and intellectual beings who have agency, and we can achieve great things when we work to do so. The task is not easy; it will take time and hard work, and its results may occur gradually. But it is achievable. Even if it is not fully achieved in one’s lifetime, one can at least work to reduce the problem, and in doing so help make things better than it would be otherwise.