Update On Fiasco Over Oregon Alcohol Taxes

The silence is deafening.

It was the unasked question until it was asked.

Last week the “Oregon Task Force on Alcohol Pricing and Addiction Services” held its second meeting. Between this and the first meeting, the Portland Oregonian reported that the OHA had buried a report commissioned by the Oregon Health Authority(OHA) and never released it. This was a final report on whether increasing excise taxes in the state on beer, wine, and cider would result in reduced consumption among the state’s heaviest drinkers who tend to cause the most problems for the state in terms of resources and economic impact.

An interim report was released in January 2021 that reported that excessive drinking cost the state $4.8 billion in 2019. That HUGE number was bandied about in order to justify proposed gigantic tax increases on beer, wine, and cider (which failed twice) and was used liberally by the OHA.

However, when the final report came out eight months later and described how raising Oregon excise taxes to the highest in the nation would barely reduce alcohol consumption by more than 1% among the state’s heaviest drinkers, well, somehow that report was never released by the OHA. It was not posted on their website as the interim report was earlier in the year.

When word of this got out, there was a bit of a firestorm. It looked a lot like the OHA was burying this report because it did not provide the narrative they wanted to spread: That increasing excise taxes on alcohol would result in measurable and important reductions in consumption by Oregon’s heaving drinkers.

A lot of people wanted to know how this could happen.