Booze tax will curb harm, cut crime

TOO OFTEN, New Mexico is on the bottom of the good lists and the top of bad lists. We have confidence a lot of these bad rankings will change as the Legislature continues to invest in public education, health care, workers’ rights and more. However, there is one piece of legislation that can help take us off the bottom of one very bad list. As of 2021 data, New Mexico ranks first in the nation in alcohol-related deaths per capita. Thankfully, Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez and Rep. Joanne Ferrary have teamed up to find a solution.

House Bill 230, otherwise known as the AHA Act, aims to increase the alcohol excise tax to roughly $.25 per drink and indexing for inflation. This would generate an additional $155,000,000 for the state, which will go directly to prevention and treatment programs . ...

Half of New Mexicans don’t drink alcohol, and most New Mexicans drink responsibly. But our current tax system has the 80% of New Mexicans who don’t drink or drink responsibly paying over $400 a year in taxes to subsidize excessive drinking. New Mexico taxpayers are footing a bill that equals $1 for each drink consumed to pay for the costs of extra police, incarceration, ambulances, emergency room visits and court hearings resulting from excessive drinking. Recently, Maryland passed an excise tax in the amount of 3%, and “Scientists later found the change reduced alcohol sales 4%, cut the number of people injured in alcohol-involved crashes by 6%, and reduced unsafe sex and associated infections. And because the alcohol tax was a fixed percent of retail prices, tax revenues there rose 25% from 2012 to 2021 even as the volume of alcohol sales declined.”

As an addictions specialist and a retired ER physician (Kruis), and an attorney and former Gallup mayor (Rosebrough), we support this legislation . ... We urge readers to contact your legislators — find them on nmlegis.gov, “find my legislator” — and ask them to support this bill ....

DR. RICK KRUIS Gallup BOB ROSEBROUGH Gallup