Reason Magazine - Topics > Alcohol

MADD Logic

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In 1985, when New York raised its alcohol purchase age to 21 under federal pressure, I was a sophomore at Cornell. One day, I was responsible enough to order a beer; the next day, I wasn't.

Nowadays, I'm irresponsible simply for bringing up the subject. Or so it would seem, judging from the way Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) has responded to the 128 (and counting) college presidents who support the Amethyst Initiative, which calls for "an informed and dispassionate public debate" about the drinking age.

"Parents should think twice before sending their teens to these colleges or any others that have waved the white flag on underage and binge drinking policies," declared MADD President Laura Dean-Mooney. The same press release quoted former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, who said "signing this initiative...endangers young lives," and Mark Rosenker, acting director of the National Transportation Safety Board, who said it invited "a national tragedy" that would "jeopardize the lives of more teens."

According to MADD, a lower drinking age will result in more drinking among 18-to-20-year-olds, which will result in more drunk driving, which will result in more dead teenagers. Therefore, if you favor a lower drinking age, you favor dead teenagers.

There are a couple of problems with this syllogism. First, although MADD insists research "unequivocally shows that the 21 law has reduced drunk driving and underage and binge drinking," the picture is not quite so clear.

In 1984 Congress passed a law that threatened to withhold highway money from states that did not increase their drinking ages to 21; by 1988 all of them had complied. Yet according to the government-commissioned Monitoring the Future Study, the rate of "binge" drinking (defined as five or more drinks in a row during the previous two weeks) among both high school seniors and college students peaked in the early 1980s, before the federal law took effect.

Traffic fatalities also were declining before then. In a 2007 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron and Yale law student Elina Tetelbaum note that the traffic fatality rate for 15-to-24-year-olds "has been decreasing steadily since 1969," while "most of the variation in the [drinking age] occurred in the 1980s."

Looking at state-level data, Miron and Tetelbaum find that "any nationwide impact" from raising the drinking age is driven by states that did so "prior to any inducement from the federal government." Even in those states, the effect "did not persist much past the year of adoption." Furthermore, raising the drinking age "appears to have only a minor impact on teen drinking." Miron and Tetelbaum conclude that a drinking age of 21 "fails to have the fatality-reducing effects that previous papers have reported."

Whether or not Miron and Tetelbaum are right, it's neither fair nor sensible to view drinking as tantamount to drunk driving. By MADD logic, if raising the drinking age to 21 saves lives, raising it to 25 or 30 would save even more. Yet when it comes to adults older than 20, the law recognizes that the problem is reckless drinking, not drinking per se.

This is the sort of distinction the Amethyst Initiative's supporters would like to reinforce. They complain that a blanket ban on alcohol consumption by 18-to-20-year-olds, who are considered adults in virtually every other respect, makes it difficult to inculcate responsible drinking habits. They argue that alcohol prohibition on campus has undermined respect for the law, since 85 percent of college students drink anyway, and created "a culture of dangerous, clandestine 'binge-drinking.'"

Treating college students like children has not made much of a dent in the rate of heavy episodic drinking on campus, which has remained around 40 percent since 1993, compared to 43 percent when the uniform drinking age was established in 1988. If the government treats people as if they're irresponsible, it should not be surprised when they behave irresponsibly.

Donna Shalala's Wet Nightmare

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:23:00 EDT

Researching tomorrow's column, I came across a MADD quote from former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, now president of the University of Miami, condemning the college presidents who want "an informed and dispassionate public debate" about the drinking age:

As a three-time university president, I can tell you that losing a student to an alcohol-related tragedy is one of the hardest and most heart-rending experiences imaginable. Signing this initiative does serious harm to the education and enforcement efforts on our campuses and ultimately endangers young lives even more. I ask every higher education leader who has signed to reconsider. I am old enough to remember life on our campuses before the 21 year drinking rule. It was horrible.

I'm also old enough to remember life on our campuses before the 21-year drinking rule, which did not apply to students at my college until halfway through my sophomore year. I don't recall it as horrible, or notably worse than it was after most students were officially forbidden to drink. To the contrary, the new restriction was a pain in the ass that made it harder to drink beer with friends at bars near the campus and encouraged us to drink liquor in private instead.

Of course, I am a generation younger than Shalala. Maybe her "horrible" experience occurred when she attended Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, in the early 1960s. It does not sound like a wild place, but who knows? Or maybe the alcohol-soaked hell was Hunter College, where Shalala was president from 1980 to 1987. Possibly she is overgeneralizing. Possibly I am. Does anyone else recall that life on campus was substantially more horrible when 18-to-20-year-olds drank legally than it was when they started drinking illegally?

Back To the Bars

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:27:00 EDT

Yesterday's column by Steve Chapman, in which the Chicago Tribune scribe argued for keeping the drinking age where it is, drew a large amount of criticism and disagreement from reason regulars.

In a week where we discussed college presidents backing a lower drinking age and bizarre school theatrics aimed at scaring kids sober, let's close out the topic with a column from reason contributor and Denver Poster David Harsanyi:

It's regularly pointed out that young adults can volunteer to serve in Iraq but are prohibited from buying a beer. But young adults are also free to produce children (many children). A young adult can plan the entire course of his or her life by the age of 21. A young adult can serve on a jury and determine the fate a fellow citizen. If a young adult chooses, he or she can act in pornographic films, gamble nightly, smoke several packs of cigarettes or, in some places, even engage in the truly depraved act of becoming a politician.
Yet this same young adult is breaking the law when ordering an appletini?

Read "Let's chuck the drinking age" here.

Start Drinking Early

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:57:00 EDT

A coalition of college presidents has aggravated the usual suspects -- and even some writers I usually agree with, like Steve Chapman and Jay Hancock -- by arguing that the drinking age should come down to 18. I'm with the anthropologist Dwight Heath, who takes their argument a step further:

[D]rinking alcohol itself is not the root of the social, legal and physical problems attributed to underage drinking. Rather, it is heavy, excessive drinking among teenagers that is causing most of the problems.

It is this culture of excessive drinking among youths that some college presidents hope to change. They want to teach young people how to drink responsibly, a lesson that I believe should include encouraging parents to drink in moderation with their underage children at home.

Heath points out that "kids who drank with their parents were about half as likely to say they had drunk alcohol in the past month and one-third as likely to say they had had five or more consecutive drinks in the previous two weeks." (He also distinguishes drinking moderate amounts at dinner, which he endorses, from supplying kids with booze for their parties, which he does not.) Most important, he points to some compelling cross-cultural evidence:

Introducing alcohol to children at a young age is a widely acceptable and culturally ingrained practice in other countries. France views drinking as an integral part of everyday life, a sociable custom usually enjoyed at the family table. Children are allowed to experiment, within limits, and no one expects that drinking will significantly change their lives. The fear that teaching kids to be responsible drinkers will only teach them to be heavy drinkers has been unfounded in other "wine cultures," including Italy and Spain. Both countries report very low rates of alcohol dependence: less than 1 percent in Italy and 2.8 percent in Spain. In the U.S., the rate is 7.8 percent.

Whatever else it may be, drinking is a learned behavior. It is shaped by a complex combination of observations, warnings and personal experience. The U.S. needs to start recreating a culture like the one we had 200 years ago where alcohol was an everyday part of family life and not the tempting forbidden fruit.

Both France and Italy, incidentally, have a drinking age of 16. I don't often get a chance to say this, so here goes: If only we were as free as France!

The Perils of a Lower Drinking Age

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Life is full of surprises, and some 100 college presidents think they have stumbled on one. They think there is too much problem drinking on campus—no surprise there—and suggest we might solve the problem by changing the drinking age. They don't propose to raise it to 25. They want to lower it to 18.

The group behind the petition they signed, Choose Responsibility, says the current drinking age is a failure. It has "not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students," the statement says, and in fact has spawned "a culture of dangerous, clandestine 'binge-drinking'—often conducted off-campus."

It's true that in the old days, there was no college culture of clandestine, off-campus binge drinking. It was out in the open, right on the quad. Another difference back then: There was more of it.

At the risk of stating the obvious, that's at least partly because in most states, the drinking age was under 21. Youngsters could buy booze legally, so they did what you would expect. They drank more and got drunk more.

It's bizarre to blame the higher age for today's staggering undergraduates. According to Monitoring the Future, an ongoing research project at the University of Michigan, binge drinking has not risen since 1988, when 21 became the minimum drinking age throughout the country. Among college students and other college-age Americans, the rate is lower today than it was then, and the decline has been even bigger among high-school students.

It's true the progress stalled around 1996. But how can that be blamed on the higher drinking age? By then, it had been the national norm for nearly a decade.

In spite of the law, plenty of 18-to-20-year-olds somehow manage to get wasted on a regular basis. But a law can be helpful without being airtight. This one has curbed not only the use of alcohol among young people, but its dangerous abuse.

Since 1988, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drunk-driving deaths have dropped in all age groups. That's due in part to stricter enforcement and changing public attitudes about drinking and driving. But they dropped most among those younger than 21. In that group, the number of alcohol-related fatalities has been cut nearly in half—even as the number of non-alcohol-related traffic deaths has been stable.

This is not a coincidence. When states lowered their drinking age in the 1970s, they got more drunk-driving deaths among teenagers than similar states that stayed at 21. A 1983 study in the Journal of Legal Studies concluded that any state that "raises its drinking age can expect the nighttime fatal crashes of drivers of the affected age groups to drop by about 28 percent."

There are other arguments for lowering the age. Maybe the most popular is that if you're old enough to join the Army and die for your country, you're old enough to buy a beer. But there is a good reason to avoid such blind consistency. Among the qualities that make 18-year-olds such good soldiers are their fearlessness and sense of immortality—traits that do not mix well with alcohol.

Besides, we don't have a single age threshold for adulthood. We give driver's licenses to 16-year-olds, but a 20-year-old Marine returning from Iraq will find he may not buy a handgun or gamble in a casino. Why permit 18-year-olds to vote but not drink? Because they have not shown a disproportionate tendency to abuse the franchise, to the peril of innocent bystanders.

Another reason is that extending the vote to 18-year-olds doesn't let even younger people gain illicit access to the polls. But if high-school seniors could legally patronize a liquor store, sophomores would find it much easier to get party fuel. Raising the drinking age to 21 reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities not only among 18-year-olds, who lost the right to drink, but 16-year-olds, who never had it.

It's not hard to make a logical case for allowing 18-year-olds to buy alcohol, but only if you disregard the practical effects of letting them do something that many of them are not mature enough to handle. In this debate, the ultimate wisdom comes from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who reminded us that sometimes, a page of history is worth a volume of logic.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

You Can Buy Wine Online—As Long As You Can Be There in Person

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:16:00 EDT

In 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned restrictions on wine sales that discriminated against out-of-state vintners. Since then (and before then too), liquor wholesalers have sought to protect their government-granted privileges by portraying direct shipment of boutique wines as the average teenager's favorite way to catch a buzz. In Indiana, for instance, preventing underage alcohol purchases is the rationale for a requirement that any consumer seeking to have wine delivered directly to his home must first have a "face-to-face meeting" with the producer, which is not exactly convenient if you live in Indianapolis and your favorite winery is in California or Oregon. Several Indiana consumers challenged this rule, arguing that it puts out-of-state wineries at a disadvantage.

In a decision (PDF) issued a couple of weeks ago, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit disagreed. Although visiting one California winery might be more difficult for a Hoosier than visiting one Indiana winery, Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote, "Many oenophiles vacation in wine country, and on a tour through Napa Valley to sample the vintners' wares a person could sign up for direct shipments from dozens of wineries." By contrast, "Wine tourism in Indiana is less common, and the state's vineyards—which altogether have fewer than 350 acres under cultivation—are scattered around the state, making it hard for anyone to sign up at more than a few of Indiana's wineries."

Easterbrook likewise was not impressed by the argument that requiring an adult's signature upon delivery and/or online verification of age would be at least as effective at preventing sales to teenagers as requiring face-to-face contact between buyer and seller. Nor does it matter, he said, that teenagers have plenty of other ways to obtain alcohol that do not involve paying premium wine prices and waiting a week or two for delivery. "It is important to remember that we are dealing with effects on the margin," he wrote. "Make it easier for minors to get wine by phone or Internet, and sales to minors will increase."

Although the court left the face-to-face requirement intact, it did overturn a rule barring any winery that sells directly to retailers in other states (thereby acting as "its own wholesaler") from shipping wine to consumers in Indiana. "The statute is neutral in terms," Easterbrook noted, "but in effect it forbids interstate shipments direct to Indiana's consumers, while allowing intrastate shipments."

In short, Indiana oenophiles who find the selection offered by local retailers inadequate may now enjoy the convenience of having any wine they like shipped directly to their homes, as long as they're willing to travel across the country for the privilege.

[Thanks to Nicolas Martin for the tip.]

Reason Writers Around Town: Katherine Mangu-Ward on "Scared Straight" Drunk Driving Prevention

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

At The Weekly Standard, Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward reports on how some high schools are using fake blood and phony death announcements to scare students away from drunk driving.

Read all about it here.

College Presidents: "How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:27:00 EDT

College presidents from Duke, Dartmouth, Ohio State, and dozens of other schools are exhausted. They've tried pretty much everything they can think of to keep 18 to 20-year-olds from having a beer (or 10). It's not working, it's never going to work, and they're petitioning for a change.

The Amethyst Initiative (so called because the Greeks believed the stones could ward off drunkenness) is a pretty cool idea. Here are a bunch of sober (figuratively), unimpeachably serious people who have issued an interesting and well-thought-out declaration about how screwed up their campuses are, in part thanks to a foolishly high drinking age:

A culture of dangerous, clandestine “binge-drinking”—often conducted off-campus—has developed.

Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.

Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.

By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.

They also make an explicit reference to the days of Dry Law, asking: "How many times must we relearn the lessons of prohibition?"

I'm especially keen on this point about eroding respect for the law. One of the first things that many teenagers do to prepare for college is get a fake ID. Congrats highway fund "incentive," you've turned us all into scofflaws before we even get started on adulthood.

Life's a Beach that Closes Two Hours Earlier Now in NJ

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:20:00 EDT

Garden State reader Jimmy sends along news from New Jersey, via the AP:

Last call in Seaside Park just got earlier.
The Borough Council approved an ordinance requiring that all establishments that hold liquor licenses close at midnight instead of the current 2 a.m....
Cheryl Raley, who owns a motel here, said the midnight closing law "will be the death sentence for businesses."
But resident Marceline Allen says Seaside Park is a family town that needs a family atmosphere.

More here.

Don't confuse Seaside Park with the adjacent and legendary skeevy town Seaside Heights (said with all reverence and respect!). But here's the Park's demographics, courtesy of Wikipedia:

There were 1,127 households out of which 16.3% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 41.3% were married couples living together, 8.9% had a female householder with no husband present, and 46.2% were non-families. 38.8% of all households were made up of individuals and 16.1% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older.

More here.

Read reason's November 2007 cover story by David Harsanyi on the return of prohibition.

Can Drunk Driving Be Funny?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:07:00 EDT

The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten wrote a very funny column a couple weeks ago, in which he gets schnockered in a driving simulator and documents the results.

Recently, he discussed the process by which a column making light of drunk driving might get approved, and offered an interesting insight into the kinds of topics that are still a bridge too far, even in an age where presidential candidates admit to doing "a little blow."

When I first proposed the idea to [my editor] Tom the Butcher, he was very concerned about one possible result: What if I continued to ace the test, well into staggering drunkitude?
"Well," I said, "I can make that funny."
"I'm sure you can," he said, "but I will not publish it."
A spirited and enlightening conversation ensued, the details of which I cannot go into here for reasons of propriety. In essence I was arguing for the transcendence of truth, and the Butcher was arguing for the transcendence of moral and civic responsibility. Both arguments had merit, but he had rank.

Fortunately, Weingarten's driving after a bottle and a half of wine on no sleep and an empty stomach was...well, I'll let the test administrator tell it: "You ran off the road after a curve. You crashed into a bus. You killed a pedestrian. You had a frontal collision with a car driving in the opposite direction in the other lane. You killed a bicyclist. As the test ended, you were beginning a dangerous maneuver that might have caused a rollover if it had continued."

All's well that ends in a fiery crash, I always say. But seriously, would it have been a public service to spike the column if Weingarten had slept well, eaten a big dinner, and been more or less OK after a few drinks?

More on the ever-falling acceptable blood alcohol level here.

First Amendment Lite

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:00:00 EDT

If you’re a perfume manufacturer and you’d like to name your latest fragrance Opium, no government agent will stop you. The world’s flagship soda is called Coke. A company called Chronic Candy has been selling lollipops flavored with cannabis flower essential oil for eight years. Energy drink connoisseurs routinely enjoy products with names like Fixx, Bong Water, Buzzed, and Speed Freak. Even the controversial energy drink Cocaine is for sale again, after revising its label to comply with Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

If you produce alcoholic beverages, however, puns, drug slang, and ghoulishly percussive monkeys may land you in trouble. Take, for example, the case of the Mt. Shasta Brewing Company. Located in tiny Weed, California, the microbrewery sells bottled versions of its five ales and lagers in retail stores in California, Oregon, and Washington. Since 2004 the bottle caps on all five Mt. Shasta beers have been emblazoned with a slogan that plays on the town’s name: “Try legal Weed.”

Anytime a producer or importer of alcoholic beverages wants to market a new product, it must submit a proposed label to the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) for approval. Earlier this year, when Mt. Shasta proprietor Vaune Dillman turned in his application for a new beer he planned to start bottling, he included the design of the bottle caps. Shortly thereafter, the TTB advised him by fax that the slogan “Try legal Weed” was an impermissible “drug reference,” adding, “We do not believe that responsible industry members should want or would want to portray their products in any socially unacceptable manner.”

To put it another way, the TTB believed the 61-year-old businessman and civic booster was guilty of a thought crime. Although no law on the books explicitly prohibits “drug references” on alcoholic beverage product labels, the bureau told him he had to stop using his socially unacceptable bottle caps.

Every year, the TTB reviews more than 100,000 proposed labels, and because the statutes and regulations it has at its disposal are both extremely specific and extremely vague, its agents often end up behaving more like cultural critics than government bureaucrats—parsing puns, interpreting illustrations, determining the artistic value of the occasional female breast. In theory, the agency is supposed to protect consumers by ensuring that product labels accurately convey a product’s identity and quality. In practice, it often disallows labels (and thus, at least temporarily, products) that it deems bad for the image of the alcoholic beverage industry, short-pouring the First Amendment in the process.

“What would you do if somebody handed you, I don’t know, Hannah Montana beer, and said, ‘Please approve this’?” asks Robert Lehrman, an attorney who specializes in beverage law and has been dealing with the TTB and its predecessor, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, for more than 20 years. “I don’t think they like making all these immensely subjective decisions on every cotton-picking label that comes down the pike. But that’s how the legislature set it up. The government decided that liquor’s taboo and therefore needs restrictions beyond those for food generally. ”

Thus, if Disney decided to market a Hannah Montana energy drink laced with enough caffeine to power the entire touring cast of High School Musical for a week’s worth of shows, it would not have to submit a proposed label to the FDA—and consequently, the FDA would not be faced with the embarrassing prospect of having to officially “approve” a product that might be considered objectionable.

If Disney decided to create a Hannah Montana pale ale, however, the TTB would either have to give an explicit endorsement or figure out some grounds on which to reject it. In such situations, the TTB resorts to nitpicking. Take the prohibition against “drug references.” While Congress grants agencies like the TTB the authority to create rules and regulations that more thoroughly interpret general statutes, the TTB’s “no drug references” edict isn’t even that official. It’s just a policy that someone decided the bureau should implement for some reason or other. In 1994 the agency published a brief notice in a newsletter outlining the new guidelines for socially acceptable labeling. “I don’t know the particular incident that brought that about,” says Art Resnick, the TTB’s director of public and media affairs, when asked about the origins of the policy. “I could look and see if anybody remembers.”

Being fuzzy on the rule’s history doesn’t prevent the TTB from enforcing it with gusto. In 2003 a Texas liquor importer named Dan Dotson began efforts to import absinthe from Kubler, a Swiss distillery that had been producing the fabled spirit since 1863. Because Kubler’s version contained less than 10 parts per million of thujone, the chemical in wormwood that had kept absinthe off the market in the U.S. since 1912, Dotson believed it was legal to sell here. After several years of discussion, the TTB agreed. But in a 2006 letter to Lehrman, whom Dotson had retained to facilitate the TTB label approval process, the agency insisted that while the beverage Kubler had produced was legal, the word absinthe (along with the variations absynthe, absente, and absinth) was an “illicit drug term” that could not be used on the labels.

Eventually, the TTB softened its stance. Now absinthe can appear on the packaging, but only as a “fanciful term” modifying some other word. One can sell “absinthe verte” or “absinthe superieure”—but not plain old “absinthe.” And probably not “absinthe weed” either. Because of absinthe’s reputation as an illegal, mind-altering substance, the TTB continues to make marketing difficult for anyone interested in selling it.

When Lance Winters, master distiller for St. George Spirits, submitted a label for his version of the spirit in 2007, it took him seven tries before he gained TTB approval. First, he says, the TTB told him the word absinthe appeared in too large a font. Then it told him his label looked too much like a British pound note. Then it said the label’s depiction of a monkey beating a human skull with a pair of femurs implied that the product had hallucinogenic properties—impermissible, since the Code of Federal Regulations does not allow labels that “create a misleading impression.”

This, alas, is government by Rorschach test. Who’s to say exactly what a cartoon monkey indicates about the properties of absinthe? Winters says he simply wanted to create a fun, light-hearted package. “Our distillery has been trying to steer people away from the idea that absinthe has hallucinogenic properties,” he explains. “I don’t want to sell a product based on promises that I can’t deliver. I want to sell this product based on the fact that it’s complex, it’s delicious, it’s something that poets and artists loved to drink because it was inspirational.”

According to Resnick, a basic tenet of the TTB’s approach is voluntary compliance. “We don’t want to take somebody’s permit,” he says. “We don’t want to put anybody out of business. So we work very hard with the businesses that we regulate to achieve voluntary compliance on their part.”

Unfortunately, the voluntary compliance the agency achieves doesn’t always feel so voluntary to those doing the complying. While Winters is happy with how his label turned out—the monkey now bangs, in unambiguously nonhallucinogenic fashion, on a cymbal, not a human skull—all that wrangling left him frustrated. “The product in the bottle had been approved,” he says. “They weren’t protecting anyone from absinthe. They were protecting people from how the absinthe had been presented. It’s wonderful that they offered solutions to help me get the label approved, but what their solutions amounted to was a dumbing down of the labels and a loss of a certain amount of freedom.”

By censoring small businessmen like Winters and Vaune Dillman over purported “drug references,” the government is enforcing the idea that it’s not just illegal to manufacture, sell, or possess certain drugs in America. It’s illegal even to possibly allude to them. Even when confined to the limited scope of alcoholic beverage labels, that’s enough to drive a man to drink.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

The Triumphant Return of the Hopsicle

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:39:00 EDT

Last summer, I posted on the travails of Rustico, a great little restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia trying to get the okay from state alcohol regulators to put frozen beer on a stick on its menu. Virginia had an old law on the books stating that alcohol must be either served in its original container or immediately after pouring. After a year of negotiation, the "hopsicle" returned to Rustico earlier this month. There's also now a bill pending in the state legislature cementing the legal status of the frozen treat.

I had one last night. It was the cherry-flavored pop you see above, made from a Belgian kriek. Very, very tasty.

Also taking effect this month in Virginia: a bill legalizing sangria. That drink was also banned in the commonwealth, due to a post-Prohibition law banning any drink that mixes spirits, wine, or beer. The law technically outlawed martinis and boilermakers, too.

Appeals Court Rules in Rack 'n' Roll Pool Hall Case

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:35:00 EDT

A few weeks ago, a three-judge panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit tossed out (pdf) most of the civil rights suit filed by David Ruttenberg, owner of the Rack 'n' Roll Pool hall in Manassas Park, Virginia. Fortunately, the court did leave one Fourth Amendment claim that could save Ruttenberg's case.

For a couple of years now, I've been reporting on how officials in the tiny town of Manassas Park have been harassing Ruttenberg and attempting to take away his business. The police there have been investigating Rutenberg for several years, for what they've recently said are drug crimes. As of yet, they've found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Ruttenberg. They've arrested him twice on charges unrelated to drugs—once for filing a false police report and once for bouncing a check—and in both cases the charges were eventually dropped.

The police in Manassas Park have hired informants to set up drug deals in Ruttenberg's bar (which they later cited as evidence that Ruttenberg's bar was a filled with drug activity). They've pulled over Ruttenberg's former girlfriends, and threatened them with charges unless they provided information against him. They've even co-opted security Ruttenberg had hired specifically for the purpose of keeping drugs out of his bar, and had them set up drug transactions in the bar.

The story took a particularly weird twist last year when local politics blogger Greg Letiecq and I revealed that one of the charges levied against Ruttenberg by the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control—that he was allowing lewd activity to go on at the bar—was due to photos dozens of photos of women dancing in various stages of undress that were taken by then-Manassas Park Vice Mayor Kevin Brendel. At the time, Brendel was working at Ruttenberg's bar as a part-time D.J. Current and former Rack 'n' Roll staff say Brendel encouraged the women to strip and put on lewd contests when Ruttenberg wasn't around, despite repeated warnings from Ruttenberg.

I've personally witnessed police harassment of Ruttenberg's customers. And I've gone through hours of surveillance video with him showing countless attempts to set him up.

Ruttenberg has shown remarkable resolve through all of this. He records every phone conversation. He keeps meticulous surveillance video that covers every corner of his property. He collects statements and affidavits from staff, friends, and witnesses. He has hired private investigators. He has a formidable collection of evidence of public corruption and police misconduct (I've spent hours with him at the bar going through it all). Unfortunately, local prosecutor Paul Ebert (the same prosecutor in the Ryan Frederick case) seems uninterested. As does the FBI. And the Virginia State Police.

The appeals court ruling was pretty dismissive of Ruttenberg's suit (the ruling also misstates several facts about the case). But the one claim they left intact may turn out to be enough. The appeals court panel reversed the district court's dismissal of Ruttenberg's Fourth Amendment claim that the tactics the police used in a 2004 raid on Rack 'n' Roll were excessive. And they most certainly were.

The police initially sought a criminal search warrant for the raid. They couldn't find a judge to grant them one. So instead, they claimed they were conducting a routine alcohol inspection, and raided the place anyway. This "regulatory inspection" was clearly intended to intimidate Ruttenberg and his customers, and to find evidence of criminality—the police brought more than 70 officers from Manassas Park and surrounding jurisdictions, some in uniform, some in plain clothes, and still others in ski-mask hats and camouflage pumping shot guns as the stormed the place (on Ladies' Night).

If this was a routine alcohol inspection, you have to wonder what an actual drug raid might have looked like. Here's Ruttenberg's surveillance video of the raid. Er, "inspection":

The only people arrested in the raid were either undercover cops or people Ruttenberg later learned were working for the police as confidential informants.

The bad news is that while the ruling remands the remaining claim back to the district court for further proceedings, the panel then expresses a good deal of skepticism about whether the remaining claim should ultimately survive. In fact, the ruling nearly instructs the district court on how to dismiss it.

The good news is that Ruttenberg has several state claims that remain intact, which he can now attach to his federal case. That gets him into discovery, where he can demand to see everything the town of Manassas Park has accumulated in its long investigation of him.

Ruttenberg's other problem right now is that he has run out of money to pursue the case any further. He had kept his bar open at a loss for a couple of years in hopes of selling it. He was finally able to sell it at a steep loss last year, but that and the legal fees he has accumulated have wrecked him. He's currently looking for legal representation to help him continue the case.

How Can You Have Your Pudding If You Don't Drink Your Wine?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:14:00 EDT

Writing in Time, John Cloud notes that "the U.S. seems to be in the midst of one of its periodic alcohol panics, this one focused on adolescents," even though drinking by teenagers has been declining since the early 1990s. "The data indicate there are fewer young drinkers," Cloud writes, "but a greater proportion of them are hard-core drinkers." He blames "the all-or-nothing approach to alcohol" that prevails in the United States and makes the case for "the Southern European model of moderate, supervised drinking within families":

The way to produce fewer problem drinkers is to create more drinkers overall—that is, to begin to create a culture in which alcohol is not an alluring risk but part of quotidian family life....There's evidence that drinking with your kids—not buying them alcohol for a party but actually drinking with them at home—is a good way to teach responsible drinking behavior.

In one study, for example, teenagers who drank with their parents (as opposed to getting alcohol from their parents for unsupervised parties) "were about half as likely to say they had drunk alcohol in the past month and about one-third as likely to say they had had five or more drinks in a row in the previous two weeks." The researchers concluded that "drinking with parents appears to have a protective effect on general drinking trends."

But Cloud notes that "social host laws," which hold adults criminally responsible for underage drinking on their property, discourage the modeling of temperate drinking. He laments that "we are encouraging kids to leave their homes (presumably by car) and drink in parks or abandoned warehouses or anywhere else they think they won't get caught and their parents won't get arrested."

The article, which quotes addiction psychologist and reason contributor Stanton Peele (who pointed it out to me), is worth reading in full, not least for the calm, measured tone we have not come to expect from newsweeklies on subjects like this.

I discussed zero tolerance and the "underage drinking epidemic" in a 2002 column.

Tennessee Takes the Fun Out of Toga Parties

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:38:00 EDT

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen signed a measure last week requiring state-funded colleges and universities to notify parents any time their kid violates a school's alcohol or drug policy.

It seems that Bredesen and crew are banking on changes made in federal rules after the Virginia Tech shootings. The Department of Education modified the language in an effort to balance "safety, privacy, and treatment."

In other words, under the guise of keeping students safe, Tennessee lawmakers are forcing state schools to send home behavioral report cards for any kid under the age of 21, whether parents want to know or not.

Bredesen—who either believes (despite available evidence to the contrary) that a freshman or sophomore getting caught with pot or doing upside-down margarita shots constitutes an emergency; or is pretending to believe such a thing in order to force parents into doling out the kind of discipline that deans cannot—has likely gone too far with the new disclosure law.

Students who decide to challenge the law in future, perhaps after mom or dad cuts them off for smoking weed out of an apple, would probably win the court battle.

That is, if their parents don't ground them for getting caught doing a 20-second keg stand while wearing an adult diaper.

Ed Carson for reason on college drinking here.

One Company Wants to Buy Another Company. America Is Doomed!!!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:28:00 EDT

So, the Belgian beermaker InBev, which brews Beck's and Stella Artois, wants to buy the maker of even shittier beer: Anheuser-Busch. But not if idiot Republican politicians have any say in the matter!

Republican Gov. Matt Blunt said Wednesday he opposes the deal, and directed the Missouri Department of Economic Development to see if there was a way to stop it.
"I am strongly opposed to the sale of Anheuser-Busch, and today's offer to purchase the company is deeply troubling to me," Blunt said in a statement.
Web sites have sprung up opposing the deal on patriotic grounds, arguing that such an iconic U.S. firm shouldn't be handed over to foreign ownership. One of the sites, called SaveAB.com, was launched by Blunt's former chief of staff, Ed Martin.
"Shareholders should resist choosing dollars over American jobs," Martin said in a statement Wednesday night. "Selling out to the Belgians is not worth it - because this is about more than beer: it's about our jobs and our nation."

One of many ironies in the matter is that Anheuser-Busch lifted the name "Budweiser" from a Czech brewery that first opened in 1795 (the word has been used to describe beer from the town of Ceske Budejovice since Medieval times). A-B has been licking its chops at the prospect of buying the original makers of Budweiser, but Czech protectionism (and the outstanding trademark disputes) has kept it from being privatized.

Bonus bad joke, grafted from the grand and pointless old Coors-boycott days of my youth: How is drinking Budweiser like making love in a canoe?

A: It's fucking near water!

Pot and Cigarettes Are Now Equally Popular (Among Teenagers)

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:31:00 EDT

The latest data from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System indicate that the percentage of teenagers who smoke marijuana is essentially the same as the percentage who smoke cigarettes. In the 2007 survey, 19.7 percent percent of high school students reported smoking marijuana at least once in the previous month, while 20 percent said they'd smoked at least one cigarette. The Marijuana Policy Project notes that tobacco smoking is declining faster among teenagers than marijuana smoking:

The cigarette use figure represents a sharp drop from the 2005 survey, when it was 23 percent. Marijuana use, at 20.2 percent in 2005, showed a much smaller decline....
Another report released this week, the Fiscal Year 2007 Annual Synar Report on tobacco sales to youth, showed the 10th straight annual decline in the rate of illegal tobacco sales to minors. In 1997, 40.1 percent of retailers violated laws against tobacco sales to minors. In 2007 the rate had dropped to just 10.5 percent, the lowest ever.
"Efforts to curb cigarette sales to teens have been wildly successful, and it's past time we applied those lessons to marijuana," said Aaron Houston, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. "Tobacco retailers can be fined or put out of business if they sell to kids, but prohibition guarantees that we have zero control over marijuana dealers. Foolish policies have guaranteed that the marijuana industry is completely unregulated."

This is true enough, and I've often made a similar argument. But honest opponents of prohibition have to admit that leakage from the adult market for any legal intoxicant is inevitable. Note that the rate for past-month alcohol consumption in the same survey was 45 percent, making it more than twice as common among teenagers as pot smoking. (That's up from 43 percent in 2005 but the same as in 2003.) To project the impact that repealing prohibition would have on underage pot smoking, you need to weigh the effect of regulation against the effect of easier, safer, and cheaper availability to adults.

Then there's the question of how much weight should be attached to the risk of increased consumption by minors. To me, underage cigarette smoking is more troubling (legal issues aside) than underage drinking or pot smoking, because it is much more likely to result in a long-term habit that has serious health consequences. Others, focusing on the immediate psychoactive effects and the associated risk of reckless behavior or academic disruption, may worry more about alcohol and pot.

I am not conceding, by the way, that a utilitarian analysis like this one is the right way to find the ideal drug policy. If adults have a fundamental right to control their bodies and the chemicals that go into them, the possibility that some may deliberately or accidentally share those chemicals with minors does not justify violating that right. But most Americans do not accept that premise, so predictions about how repealing prohibition would affect The Children are unavoidable.

MADDsteria

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sat, 31 May 2008 13:53:00 EDT

Taking those gory driver's ed videos to the next level:

Many juniors and seniors were driven to tears – a few to near hysterics – May 26 when a uniformed police officer arrived in several classrooms to notify them that a fellow student had been killed in a drunken-driving accident.

The officer read a brief eulogy, placed a rose on the deceased student’s seat, then left the class members to process their thoughts and emotions for the next hour.

The program, titled “Every 15 Minutes,” was designed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Its title refers to the frequency in which a person somewhere in the country dies in an alcohol-related traffic accident.

About 10 a.m., students were called to the athletic stadium, where they learned that their classmates had not died. There, a group of seniors, police officers and firefighters staged a startlingly realistic alcohol-induced fatal car crash. The students who had purportedly died portrayed ghostly apparitions encircling the scene.

Though the deception left some teens temporarily confused and angry, if it makes even one student think twice before getting behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated, it is worth the price, said California Highway Patrol Officer Eric Newbury, who orchestrates the program at local high schools.
[...]
“If I sit there and lecture somebody in a nice way, it's going to go in one ear and out the other,” he said. “In today's world, where they have all sorts of gore and fantastic things that kids can access on the computer, if you want to compete with that, you have to jar them emotionally.
“I want them to be an emotional wreck. I don't want them to have to live through this for real.”

Forbidden Sacramental Wine and Madonna of the Hamptons

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:54:00 EDT

The flowers are blooming, the bees are buzzing, and fancy galleries in the Hamptons are debuting photo exhibits featuring Madonna half-naked with a riding crop. Ah, spring.

And what would go better with the aforementioned photo than a glass of vino and a cheese tray? Absolutely nothing, thought 67-year-old Vered Gallery owner Ruth Kalb. The East Hampton police thought otherwise, dropping in for a routine inspection, liquor confiscation, and a good handcuffing. (No, not by Madonna.)

"It's going to take a lot more than that for me to stop doing what I'm doing," [gallery owner Ruth Kalb] told The New York Post.

Like everyone's favorite Mennonite raw milk rebel, Kalb could have gotten a permit, but didn't, and doesn't think she has anything to apologize for.

There a nice snooty weekend home Jets and Sharks aspect to the story as well, with the Southampton cops talking trash about the East Hampton cops' overreaction.

Read more under the New York Postalicious headline "Booze & Hisses."

Via reason contributor Todd Seavey, who writes that this is the kind of incident that "should just cut across ideological divides and unite everyone not simply in thinking 'That sounds excessive' but in thinking 'Government is complete bullshit, and we were not born to be slaves to these uniform-wearing goons.'"

Drinking and Driving for Public Safety

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:14:00 EDT

Last month, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released the results of a report that asked 124,000 adults if they had driven under the influence of alcohol in the last year.

The results were kinda' fun. Wisconsin finished with the worst results in the country, with one in four respondents having admitted to driving under the influence over the previous 12 months. The survey results led to articles like this one, proving the psychology and demographics of the state's residents to explain their risky behavior.

But as the National Motorists Association points out, Wisconsin's highway fatality rate is significantly lower than the national average. Riffing off how government typically manipulates data like this in the public health context, NMA satirically suggests a public health campaign encouraging a drink or two before getting behind the wheel.

What's not exactly clear is whether the government agency that conducted the survey defined "under the influence (and if they did, how they defined it), or if they left it up to the respondents to come up with their own definition. What does seem clear is that the state with the most drivers under the influence (or at least the state that's most honest about it) isn't exactly littering its highways with dead motorists.

In other DWI news, you might want to steer clear of San Antonio this weekend. Officials there announced this week that police will forcibly draw blood from any motorist who refuses a breath test.

DWI for Walking a Bicycle

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:23:00 EDT

Jeff Brown of Columbus, Ohio was arrested for DWI, spent four days in jail, and had his license suspended for six months when he refused to take a breath test after an officer confronted him on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated. Brown was walking his bicycle across his own front yard. Brown has since made a YouTube video detailing his ordeal.

Via Lawrence Taylor, who notes that in 2005, a woman in Florida was arrested for DWI for operating her own wheelchair while intoxicated. That case, fortunately, was thrown out.

MORE: The appellate court decision describes the facts of the case this way:

The record contains scant details of the underlying facts of this case, but it appears appellant was riding a bicycle on a sidewalk on December 18, 2004, when he was detained by a police officer.

Make of that what you will.

I'll Need to See Your Permit

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:54:00 EDT

I don't know which is worse, that the city of Cleveland requires a "music permit" and a "pool table permit," or that failing to obtain one is a criminal offense.

MADD as Hell at GTA IV

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:24:00 EDT

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) pans the just-released latest iteration of the massively popular vid game Grand Theft Auto:

Noting that drunk driving claims nearly 13,500 lives each year, MADD said that it is "extremely disappointed" that the game lets users get virtually drunk and then get behind the wheel of an equally virtual automobile.
"Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke," MADD said. "Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime, and it is also 100 percent preventable."
MADD is asking the Entertainment Software Rating Board to bump Grand Theft Auto IV's rating up to AO for Adults Only from M for Mature. The ESRB's content descriptors for the game currently include "use of drugs and alcohol." The parental group also said that it is asking the game's "manufacturer" (presumably Take-Two Interactive) to consider stopping distribution out of a sense of social responsibility, or out of respect for those who've been hurt or killed by drunk drivers.

More here.

MADD has to get in line to pan GTAIV, which is pulling weak reviews such as this one: "GTA IV on Sony PS3: Resolution, Online Issues Hamper Experience."

reason's November 2007 cover story, "Prohibition Returns!," discussed MADD's mission creep from an anti-drunk driving org to an anti-alcohol group. Read all about it here.

Mike's Hard Lemonade Yields Hard Time

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:11:00 EDT

Absent-minded professor dad buys lemonade for his kid at a baseball game. Turns out it's a Mike's Hard Lemonade.

After a guard spots the bottle, the kid is whisked away to the hospital in an ambulance (!) where they found no trace of alcohol in his blood about 90 minutes later. The doctors said he was OK to go, but instead he wound up in foster care. It was "two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before [dad Christopher] Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house."

Everyone involved seems to have come down with a serious case of "just following orders":

The sympathetic cop who interviewed Ratte and his son at the hospital said she was convinced what happened had been an accident, but that her supervisor was insisting the matter be referred to Child Protective Services.
And Ratte thought the two child protection workers who came to take Leo away seemed more annoyed with the police than with him. "This is so unnecessary," one told Ratte before driving away with his son.
But there was really nothing any of them could do, they all said.

Jacob Sullum wrote about the hard treatment of girly beer substitutes at the hands of the law here.

Boston Bans Bottle Service

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:04:00 EDT

It's Thursday at 4:00 pm, which means the weekend has officially begun in college towns across the country. But bad news is coming down the pike for hearty partiers in Boston: A ban on bottle service in bars.

Letters are going out to unsuspecting bar and club owners at this very moment, informing them that bottle service violates Boston's existing ban on serving more than 2 drinks at a time to a customer.

The hilariously dismissive money quote from Boston Licensing Board Chairman Daniel Pokaski:

“We’re not New York and we’re not South Beach,” he said. “The city of Boston has a lot more to offer than just getting people inebriated. If all they can offer their clientele is just swilling down alcohol, then perhaps they shouldn’t be in the business.”

Not so long ago, Boston's esteemed politicians professed themselves shocked (shocked!) that people go to baseball games to booze it up.

Via Crispy on the Outside