Higher taxes on cigarettes could decrease alcohol binging as well as smoking habits in males an young adults.
Past research has found "smokers drink more," Ali Yurasek, a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Memphis, who participated in the study, told NBC News.
This new study found when the cost of cigarettes went up, binge drinking went down in said demographics.
"What our analysis shows is an association between increasing cigarette tax and decreasing [alcohol consumption] among segments of the population, those being male smokers, male hazardous drinkers, and young adult smokers in particular," Sherry A. McKee, associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University Medical School, and one of the study's authors, said, according to NBC News.
The study - conducted by researchers at Yale, Stanford and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute - looked at data from over 11,000 U.S. people. They focused on 31 states that had increased their cigarette tax between 2001 and 2002 or 2004 and 2005.
The team tracked changes in alcohol consumption through data from the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions.
Males smokers were found to drink 10 percent less alcohol and binged an average of seven times less per year when the taxes increased.
Young adult males between the ages of 18 and 29 cut down on binge drinking by one-quarter in the scenario.
"That's pretty consistent with behavioral economics concepts," Yurasek said.
Yusarek recently participated in a study that found smokers were "willing to pay for more alcohol than non-smokers."
Past studies on animals found nicotine can make alcohol more rewarding because it " increases the response of dopamine-emitting neurons."
The difference between male and females in nicotine and alcohol consumption has not yet been explained, but men are twice as likely to binge drink.
When NBC asked McKee about the affect of electronic cigarettes on alcohol she said the results would most-likely be similar.
"[Studies have shown] when nicotine has been administered in other forms aside from cigarettes, or tobacco, we do see increases in drinking behavior," she said.
The data in the test was self-reported, and was collected from varied states and time periods. Because of this, the researchers were not able to find a solid cause-and-effect relationship.
