12 replies on “The Anti-Liquor Campaign”

  3. Dominic, your bias is showing in the title: “Anti-Liquor Campaign.” The group caught lying are actually the opponents of I-1183. For you, this is a vote on liquor itself, not on how it is sold/distributed.

  4. I wonder if the fact that we’re 3rd in DUI fatalities has anything to do with the fact that we have to do our drinking in bars rather than at home if we didn’t plan ahead and hit up the liquor store before 9 (or sometimes earlier).

    Nah, it is probably just the rain.

  5. @3 is closer to the truth.

    The actual answer is that everyone lies nowadays in elections, since it is in FACT, legal.

    Don’t like it?

    Then replace the Surpreme Court.

  6. I was trying to figure out how to spend my afternoon and there it is! Well, see ya guys, I’m off to replace the Supreme Court!

    On an only slightly related note, if anyone knows where to find an ethnic lesbian midget with a southern accent, please shoot me a text. Thanks!

  8. 48% may be a bogus figure, but the research on increasing the availability of alcohol clearly shows an uptick in both drinking (especially youth drinking) and alcohol-related harm. How do I know? I did the research:

    http://lib.adai.washington.edu/resourceb…

    Nobody “bankrolled” me. I was just doing my job (I’m a research librarian at the UW).

    Also, I think they merely mis-cited the research study (the one attributed to the CDC). It was actually done by a task force in the US Dept of Health: http://keystoneresearch.org/sites/keysto…. This study refutes the suggestion that rates of drinking went down in Iowa or West VA after deregulation (the research that suggested it did is many, many years older than this DoH paper). In all my months of searching on this topic, I never found a single research study that found that increased availability of alcohol did NOT increase rates of drinking and drinking-related harm.

    I noticed the posts you cited that refute this didn’t cite any research papers themselves? If they’ve seen current research supporting their position on this, I would love to include it in my research brief.

    Incidentally, full disclosure: I’m for privatization this round (I was against it last time because giving it away for free made absolutely no sense whatsoever). The state needs the money. Just hope we don’t end up spending a lot more than we gain on the potential social harms that may result (increased morbidity/mortality, increased violent crime, increased traffic accidents, etc. — you’ll find evidence supporting the likelihood of these types of increasing in the brief I posted above).

    I like cheap booze just as much as the next librarian, I assure you. But if your primary argument for supporting this measure is that no harm can come from it, you need a better argument.

  10. #8 did the research go into the affects increased alcohol consumption had on other drugs? I’ve done no research and can provide no facts, but my gut feeling is that an increased availability of hard liqueur would decrease the use and consumption of beer/wine (at least to an extent), which could potentially decrease the instances of underage drinking and driving. As kids seem much more willing to drive after a few beers than they are after sharing a handle among friends. And could potentially decrease the use of other drugs, if booze was more readily available.

    I’m not really sure if that’s a good thing though.

    I don’t really care that much about underage alcohol consumption. I do care about underage drinking related deaths/injuries, but many, many other states have easily accessible booze and it doesn’t seem to make a difference. I would be interested in the relationship privatization would have on drug use among those under 21. Growing up in California it was far easier to get your hands on pot than it was alcohol, even if alcohol was never really that difficult to buy. In college it was much easier to buy any drug than it was to buy beer if you didn’t know anyone of age or with a fake ID. But I did go to a school in a relatively dry town.

  11. On a similar note, I did a mountain of research on underage drinking cross-tabulated with distribution models for a number of different states, some with state-controlled stores, some with ‘open access’ (where beer, wine, and liquor are available in groc/c-stores) and with private ‘controlled access’ ( beer, wine and liquor only available in specific alcohol stores). No model showed any advantage, and rates varied among all models.

    What seemed to matter much more was community norms and enforcement. here is a handy map and chart w/ 2003-04 numbers. It should be noted that N Dakota (where I grew up, and which leads the nation) is a state where alcohol (including beer and wine) is only available in privately run liquor stores that do not permit minors in the door. In many cities they are still shut on Sunday and holidays. No easy answers, just lots of hard work.
    http://oas.samhsa.gov/2k6/stateUnderageD…

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