The Neo-Prohibitionists Are At It Again

We've all been to those parties where someone says, "Hold my beer and watch!" Or at least we've seen them on TV. Of course the results are disasterous. Which is, I suppose, why they are on TV in the first place.

Well, a recently published study finds that 5 beers account for most emergency room visits: Budweiser, Steel Reserve, Colt 45, Bud Ice and Bud Light.

AB InBev got three in the top five! I'm sure they are celebrating in Brussels. Their King Cobra also made runner-up:

Four brands of malt liquor (Steel Reserve, Colt 45, Bud Ice and King Cobra) accounted for 46 percent of the beer consumed by the patients, even though those four brands account for only 2.4 percent of beer consumed in the general population.

To conduct the study, researchers interviewed people admitted to the Johns Hopkins Emergency Room in Baltimore, MD, on weekends from April 2010 to June 2011. Only 105 people admitted to drinking before being admitted and 68 were men.

"Recent studies reveal that nearly a third of injury visits to Level I trauma centers were alcohol-related and frequently a result of heavy drinking," lead author David Jernigan, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, said in a Hopkins news release.

"Understanding the relationship between alcohol brands and their connection to injury may help guide policy makers in considering taxation and physical availability of different types of alcohol given the harms associated with them," he explained.