In its fight for survival, the LCB this week enlisted help from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to reinforce the agency’s arguments for modernizing the state’s liquor stores over privatizing them. As the Inquirer reports, LCB’s chief executive officer Joe Conti in testimony before the Senate Law and Justice Committee cited preliminary findings of a study conducted recently by a special CDC task force that cautions against privatization of liquor sales. In the cases studied by the task force, they found privatization leads to increased alcohol consumption. It argues that this jump is directly related to excessive drinking, which despite being categorized as fully preventable, accounts for as many as 79,000 deaths each year. Based on the study, the CDC’s task force recommends against further privatization of alcohol sales in settings where state and local governments controls retail sales. [Inquirer]
