The Raising of Minimum Alcohol Prices in Saskatchewan, Canada: Impacts on Consumption and Implications for Public Health
Tim Stockwell, PhD, Jinhui Zhao, PhD, Norman Giesbrecht, PhD, Scott Macdonald, PhD, Gerald Thomas, PhD, and Ashley Wettlaufer, MPH
The contribution of both individual- and population-level alcohol consumption to in- creased risk of a range of serious chronic diseases (e.g., cancers, liver diseases) and ad- verse acute events (e.g., injuries, poisonings) is well documented.1,2 In the World Health Or- ganization Region of the Americas report, alcohol is identified as the single leading cause of the preventable loss of disability adjusted life years.1 Globally, hazardous and harmful alco- hol use has been found to be the leading contributing cause of death among young adults, involving especially, deaths from road trauma, homicide, and suicide.3
Successive comprehensive and systematic reviews of published research conclude that governments have a number of proven strategies to reduce the burden of illness from alcohol.4,5
