Alcohol and Public Policy Beyond the Shadow of Prohibition (1981) / Chapter Skim
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5. Shaping Drinking Practices Directly
5. Shaping Drinking Practices Directly
Pages 79-99
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From page 79... ...
Governments can seek to influence collective drinking practices through instruments that operate with varying degrees of force. At one extreme, governmental authorities can embody conceptions of appropriate or tolerable drinking norms in statutes and regulations (e.g., laws prohibiting drunken driving, being drunk in public, being intoxicated while flying a plane, and drinking by minors)
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From page 80... ...
Sometimes the programs do nothing more than provide information about drinking through labeling or mass media advertising. Other times, the programs take advantage of organizations such as schools, churches, and health maintenance organizations to disseminate the messages in more localized ways.
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From page 81... ...
In our view, these aspects of drinking behavior are suitable targets in part because the behavior is tied to some of the worst consequences of current drinking practices and in part because current attitudes and practices are supportive enough to allow governmental efforts but not so widely honored that such efforts would be redundant. Some statistical and causal elaboration, focusing for illustrative purposes on the relation of alcohol to mortality, indicates what is at stake in these areas.
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From page 82... ...
historical study of American attitudes toward the role of alcohol in casualties and crime shows that, on the whole, colonists in this country believed alcohol made people clumsy; by and large, they did not believe it made people violent. The latter belief was an innovation of the temperance era.
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From page 83... ...
83 DRINKING PRACTICES AND THE LAW In two major areas, governments have sought to shape drinking practices through laws backed by criminal penalties. The two areas are drunken driving and public drunkenness.
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From page 84... ...
At the outset, one might reasonably be skeptical about the value of such laws. Even though we now spend significant sums enforcing these laws and have more arrests nationwide for drunken driving than for any other offense, the probability of being arrested for drunken driving is now estimated to be roughly 1 in 2,000.
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From page 85... ...
However, this dramatic effect gradually diminished. The relevant time series data, adjusted by Ross for seasonal and other external variations, show a gradual decline in auto injuries from 1966 to 1967, rapidly falling when the RSA went into effect; the curve then flattened, and began to rise in 1970.
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From page 86... ...
The question of whether and how the dramatic initial results of the British Road Safety Act might have been sustained thus remains somewhat obscure. A series of cases potentially as significant as the RSA are the Alcohol Safety Action Programs (ASAP)
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From page 87... ...
174~. Thus, some moderately persuasive evidence exists suggesting that effectively enforced drunken driving laws will deter drunken driving and reduce accidents and fatalities associated with it.
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From page 88... ...
Alternatively, the laws could be seen as devices for preventing drunks from harming others. To the extent that public drunkenness is related to violence, vandalism, and other forms of disorder, the laws against public drunkenness could be understood as devices to allow the police to intervene early and moderately in situations that could become dangerous much as laws against drunken driving or the illegal carrying of weapons are assumed to operate.
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From page 89... ...
There remains at least the possibility that public drunkenness has increased in frequency and that some increase in violence, vandalism, and disorder is associated with this change. We wish the research in this area were more complete and illuminating, but we suspect that the laws against public drunkenness were not operating to hold drunken violence within tight bounds all those years.
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From page 90... ...
Specifically, we look at three kinds of programs: educational programs directed at youths through educational institutions (primarily public schools) ; mass media information campaigns; and community-based health information and training programs.
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From page 91... ...
The alliance of the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol Information in NIAAA and the network of prevention coordinators within state alcoholism authorities resulted in a proliferation of new educational materials as well as a marked increase in attention to evaluation and research. Whereas 15 years ago alcohol education was a desultory part of the high school health curriculum, there are now numerous alcoholcentered programs sponsored by NIAAA's Prevention Division, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the U.S.
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From page 92... ...
MASS MEDIA INFORMATION CAMPAIGNS Typically, education for adults is viewed primarily in terms of mass media campaigns. The publicists of the temperance movement were masters of media campaigns.
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From page 93... ...
COMMUNITY-BASED HEALTH INFORMATION AND TRAINING Perhaps the most promising new approach in the area of education and training is a program that combines carefully designed mass media campaigns with personalized behavioral training provided through schools, volunteer associations, or health maintenance organizations. The most widely known (but by no means the only)
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From page 94... ...
The sponsors of TCS reasoned that televised and radio spots of 10 to 60 seconds' duration, if widely viewed many times, could get messages attended to very well; mass media might not succeed in telling people what to think, but they could do an excellent job of telling people what to think about (Cohen 19634. There were some 50 TV spots and more than 100 radio spots.
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From page 95... ...
Certain detailed findings are of particular interest. Smoking cessation was not achieved to any great extent in the mass-media-only town, but 50 percent of those receiving intensive instructions (versus 0 to 15 percent of the high-risk controls)
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From page 96... ...
It may be in information and training programs sponsored by universities and health maintenance organizations focusing on the health risks of some drinking practices and teaching techniques for modifying personal drinking habits. SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE: A NOTE ON SYMB OLIC EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT ACTIONS As Mosher and Mottl document (in this volume)
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From page 97... ...
It can be argued that a reasonably consistent approach to alcohol throughout the federal government's jurisdiction would be a desirable component of any government-sponsored program to shape drinking practices. This argument is appealing in institutional terms because it seems easier to establish a coherent line within one level of government than to operate through the myriad state and local agencies that write laws and regulations, enforce them, mount preventive training programs, and so on.
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From page 98... ...
Major barriers to more aggressive action in this area seem to be some confusion about the nature of the offense and ambiguity about institutional leadership. Ironically, the confusion about the offense has been created partly by mass media campaigns against drunken driving.
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From page 99... ...
well-designed local mass media campaigns that increase public salience and private concern about drinking practices with (2) low-keyed programs offering simple behavioral training techniques to those who are motivated to change their drinking practices.
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