Objectives: This is to review drinking behavior and policies to reduce harms caused by alcohol use in Korea and to discuss their implications from a health promotion perspective. Methods: A purported selection was made to include extant literature on drinking behaviors and alcohol control policies into this review. For drinking behaviors reports of national health statistics were used while reports of alcohol control policies submitted to public institutes/organizations were selected for review. Results: Alcohol consumption per capita indicates stable trends over the last two decades. However, percentages of drinkers with high risk drinking over time vary; men remains stable while female appears to increase. Relatively, a few data and/or reports were available about harms derived from alcohol use. Although there are alcohol policies being cost-effective to deal with alcohol related harm in Western society, few alcohol policy available in Korea of being effective, cost-effective with respect to reduction of harms associated with alcohol use. Conclusions: Policy emphasis should be shift from drinkers to availability of alcohol to reduce alcohol related harms with taking health in all policies into consideration. Both statutory mechanism and public acceptance should be of high priority in putting recommended alcohol policy into action.