Dr Eric Crampton: How police alcohol activism risks overstepping the mark

When Guyon Espiner reported on a police estimate of ‘$7.8b harm from booze’, I was curious whether the figure was the old BERL alcohol cost zombie back again from the dead to torment the living.

The BERL number included drinkers’ spending on their own alcohol – not a ‘social cost’ by any reasonable standard. Other costs were counted twice. It was …unsound. Only about a fifth of BERL’s number could count as a social cost by a more standard method.

So, I asked Radio New Zealand for the original documents, hoping to find a source for the figure. No source was cited, but police communications staff later confirmed that the number was BERL’s.