Other Issues in DC Debate

A recent debate held in Washington DC sponsored by the National Commission Against

Drunk Driving (NCADD) revealed that

activists, researchers, lobbyists and lawyers can still become very passionate about the appropriate ways that should be pursued to continue to reduce the toll of drunk driving. NCADD, a coalition of alcohol beverage and other industry members, activists and researchers, believes that "America is now in a plateau of complacency when it comes to drunk driving," and it wants to step up efforts to reduce drunk driving deaths to 11,000 per year by 2005, a reduction of 5,000 annually. One interesting twist: while the outgoing president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) argued for .08 BAC limits and claimed that MADD does not "at this time" (our emphasis) advocate even lower BAC standards, a NY attorney who represents people arrested for DWI insisted that the only appropriate standard for drinking and driving is "zero tolerance." He called the concept that one can use any drug and drive a vehicle "barbaric." In the future, he predicted, drinking (any amount) and driving simply "will not be tolerated." (MADD

"Economic factors have little direct influence on alcohol consumption," concluded Dr. Garland Brinkley of the Prevention Research Center in a provocative recent study. Importantly, Brinkley called into question the commonly-held assumption that alcohol prices directly influence consumption levels. His results rather suggest that the "relationship between economic factors and the aggregate quantity of alcohol consumed is not as straightforward nor as well understood" as is assumed by public-health advocates and some lawmakers. Indeed, his findings suggest that consumption level may affect prices, not vice versa.

Brinkley showed that even while alcohol prices dropped and median household income rose in recent years, per capita consumption decreased. Studies that rely on economic theory to conclude that consumption levels are primarily determined by price and income, he wrote, "implicitly ignore" the fact that these economic factors themselves are based on other (non-economic) conditions like years of experience, education level, gender, race, public policy, etc. Brinkley examined changes in per capita consumption in the US between 1951 and 1993. Instead of assuming that price/ income directly increased consumption, Brinkley built a model that attempted to determine the effects of the key economic, demographic and social factors, regardless of the direction of that effect. Though the methodology was complex, the results were clear: price and income do not by themselves impact consumption but simply "reflect or are a conduit

for changes in social and demographic variables." In fact, the data suggested that consumption may influence price. After observing consumption through numerous time-spans, Brinkley concluded: "retail outlets of alcohol beverages are lowering prices¼ in an effort to stop declining sales from other causes (like the aging of the population)."

Brinkley found that per capita consumption was influenced directly through the "aging of the US population, the increase of marital instability, and greater participation by women in the labor force," but only indirectly through economic factors. For example, the data showed that changes in marital status of the population from 1950-1993 caused consumption to drop by 0.36 gallons, while the same changes in marital status led to income factors that increased alcohol consumption by 0.12 gallons. Brinkley also found "excluding economic factors" in his analysis had a "negligible" effect on his ability to estimate alcohol consumption for the period of the study. Brinkley stressed the need for more research into the "interdependence" of factors influencing consumption, but perhaps these results will encourage lawmakers to re-examine the assumption - so central to current alcohol policy debates

INSIGHTS will review "Drinking Occasions: Comparative Perspectives on Alcohol and Culture," the new book by anthropologist Dwight Heath, an academic who has long advocated that drinking must be viewed in a broad cultural context, not as an isolated act. Heath's position is supported by the violence study cited above. Dr. Morris Chafetz, founding director of NIAAA, recently described the book as "eminently sensible, intelligent and hopeful" in a review for the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. He singled out for praise Heath

Tobacco and alcohol "should not be linked for regulatory or educational purposes." That common-sense conclusion came from the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) following its recent review of about 170 studies of the health effects of the two substances. The body of research conducted over the past 26 years clearly identified "substantial differences" between alcohol and tobacco. Those differences have important public health policy implications: ACSH rightly pointed out that the mainstream media "often suggests that any use" of tobacco and alcohol "has similar detrimental effects on health." And public health advocates often advance the same restrictions

"This is the only case we've been able to find where a court has upheld a law that prohibits a group of newspapers from publishing constitutionally protected information." So said ACLU attorney Vic Walczak to a college newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania. Not surprisingly, the protected speech he referred to involves alcohol beverages. Specifically, the state of Pennsylvania bans bars from advertising alcohol beverages in college newspapers. A US District Court and US Appeals Court upheld the law after the University of Pittsburgh's Pitt News challenged it. The law violated the 1^st Amendment and cost the paper thousands of dollars in annual revenue, Pitt News argued. In a deft twist of logic, the appeals court ruled the law does not restrict content since the paper "is free to seek advertising from a myriad of sources, including purveyors of alcoholic beverages, so long as those beverages are not mentioned in the advertisements." Does that mean brewers should be allowed to advertise on television, but not mention beer? Right now they

Just as alcohol control advocates mistakenly assume that simply reducing the availability of alcohol beverages will reduce alcohol problems, anti-gun activists have linked the number of weapons in circulation to crime rates. But, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, "gun-related deaths and woundings" in the US have dropped sharply in recent years while gun sales increased. In fact, despite an estimated 10% increase in the number of guns in circulation from 1993 to 1997, the number of gun-related deaths and woundings declined by nearly 1/3. Similarly, the number of alcohol-related traffic deaths dropped by 1/3 from 1988 to 1998 while total volume of beer, wine and spirits increased slightly. It

"Drinking patterns¼ were a poor predictor of intimate partner violence overall," a recent study concluded, raising doubts about a widely-held belief. The lack of a consistent relationship between even heavy drinking and likelihood of intimate partner violence in this study of 1,440 couples was striking. Indeed, the authors point

drunk driving and alcohol dependence, did not predict male-to-female personal violence¼ . Overall, the effect of drinking patterns then changes by gender, across ethnic groups and whether the behavior being predicted" is perpetrated by males or females. Clearly, there’s no support in this study for the notion that alcohol "causes" violence.

"There were no consistent associations between perpetrator drinking pattern and partner violence," the authors concluded. Just as rates of violence differed significantly between the three groups, so did the relationship between drinking patterns and the likelihood of violence vary widely. "For example," the authors wrote, "while greater proportions of male frequent heavy drinkers reported male-to-female partner violence than abstainers or other drinkers, there was no statistically significant linear association between the level of male drinking and the occurrence" of that type of violence. Interestingly, while it "appeared" that among white men the likelihood of their committing violence increased with consumption, "for both black and Hispanic men¼ abstainers reported more violence than infrequent drinkers did." But rates of violence then increased with frequency of drinking among black and Hispanic males. Among women, they continued, "there was a significant association between drinking patterns and female-to-male partner violence for blacks, but not for whites." What’s more, "racial/ethnic differences¼ seen in the percentages of those drinking during partner violence do not correspond with racial/ethnic differences in population drinking rates." Men drink more than women, and are more likely to have been drinking during a violent incident, but while black men are far more likely to engage in intimate partner violence than white men, they are not more likely to drink or to be frequent heavy drinkers than white males. Similarly, black women are not more likely than white or Hispanic women to drink or drink heavily, but they are far more likely to report drinking during acts of partner violence. Therefore, the authors concluded: "the higher percentage of blacks drinking during episodes of intimate partner violence cannot be attributed to a greater number of drinkers or heavier drinking patterns among blacks in the community." These findings supported an earlier study, according to the authors, which had found that number of drinks consumed per week didn’t predict violence. They also fall in line with earlier work by the same authors that found no correlation between trends in per capita alcohol consumption among blacks, whites and Hispanics and several alcohol problems.