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Vice in a vise (continued)


I think this would be a good time for a beer.

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, upon the repeal of Prohibition.

AS MOST PEOPLE with a cursory knowledge of American history are aware, the 18th Amendment was a colossal failure. The simple fact of the matter is that people like to drink. It’s been central to the American experience ever since the Pilgrims first came ashore early on Plymouth Rock because they’d run out of "beere."

Yet today, there still exists a faction of folks who want to suppress, even eliminate, alcohol consumption. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that Prohibition could someday make a comeback. A handful of well-funded organizations are working together to ensure that alcohol is vilified and that people drink less and less. The rules and regulations they advocate — taxation, more stringent licensing, censoring of ads — are aimed as much at moderate consumption as at real problems like addiction and drunk driving.

Take a group like the American Medical Association. It’s an eminently respectable institution, yet in late 2002, it came out in favor of a total ban on prime-time-television beer and wine ads. Or the National Academy of Sciences, which in 2003 commissioned a study exploring ways to curb underage drinking. What was one of its primary solutions to a very real problem? Increasing taxes on beer. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is another organization that’s often accused of having a neo-prohibitionist agenda. It used its $8 billion endowment to fund groups like the Rand Corporation — which pins youth drinking on "advertising that links alcohol to everyday life" (as opposed, apparently, to a life of depravity and perdition) — and even anti-alcohol editorial writers. According to the Center for Consumer Freedom — which represents a coalition of restaurateurs, tavern owners, and, yes, tobacco companies — the RWJF has "funded campaigns to ban alcohol from airports, parks, cultural events, sports stadiums, and even golf courses. It funds efforts to restrict the hours bars, restaurants, and liquor stores can stay open. And it has never met an alcohol tax it didn’t like. Taken together, these efforts have been called prohibition ‘drip by drip.’ "

Even Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is guilty of overreaching. Founded in 1980 to rid roads of drunk drivers, the group has come far in raising awareness and reducing accidents. But with that, it seems, MADD has moved the goalposts, falling victim to "mission creep" that has seen it morphing from an anti-drunk-driving organization to an anti-drinking organization.

A glance at MADD’s Web site bears this out. Plenty of its advocacies are aimed directly at the sin of drunk driving; for example, it voices support for dram-shop-liability laws, which hold alcohol-serving establishments responsible for damage caused by intoxicated patrons. Further down the page, however, one sees that MADD wants to rid the United States of "practices which encourage excessive alcohol consumption," such as happy hours and drink specials.

MADD’s manifesto on alcohol advertising reads like an abstruse, legally binding contract. "[M]edia entities (television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and Internet) should establish and/or be held accountable to strong guidelines that will restrict alcohol advertising and marketing from reaching underage audiences and that those standards should apply to all alcohol advertising including beer, wine, distilled spirits, and malt beverages," it reads, adding that alcohol ads must not "feature actors, models or other talent or characters under the age of 30 ... use celebrities, music stars, athletes, animals, cartoon characters, or other language or images that appeal to youth ... depict sports [or] rock concerts ... [or] depict revelry or hint at the possibility of inebriation." Moreover, it demands that alcohol ads be counterbalanced by a "matching amount and comparable placement of air time/ad space for alcohol-related public health and alcohol-related safety messages for young people and adults."

The outward aim of all this imperiousness is to curb underage drinking, of course. But one gets the feeling MADD would be pleased as punch if these stringent stipulations somehow also sent liquor sales plummeting. Even MADD’s founder, Candy Lightner, has distanced herself from the group, expressing serious qualms about the direction it’s taken. "It has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned," she told the Washington Times in 2002.

Then there are more disturbing instances, examples of a frighteningly fascistic enforcement of sobriety. In a white paper titled "Back Door Prohibition: The New War on Social Drinking," Radley Balko, from the libertarian Cato Institute, recounts a case that should chill the marrow of any American who believes in an adult’s right to behave like an adult:

In December 2002 police in Fairfax County, Virginia initiated a series of ‘stings’ in bars and taverns.... Eighteen tavern patrons were singled out, while still inside the tavern, and ordered to submit to alcohol breath tests. Half of them were then arrested for ‘public intoxication.’ None of the patrons had made an attempt to get behind the wheel of a car. None had been a nuisance for bartenders or caused any type of disturbance.... Police Chief J. Thomas Manger told the Washington Post, "Public intoxication is against the law. You can’t be drunk in a bar." When asked where someone could be drunk, he replied: "At home. Or at someone else’s home, and stay there till you’re not drunk." (Emphasis in original.)

The crackdown on alcohol is most keenly felt on college campuses. No one disputes that student binge drinking poses serious problems. But in seeking to quash undergrads’ overindulgence, many rules and regulations miss the point — and shift the problem. Take keg-registration laws. They make it easy to track purchases, and to hold customers liable for underage drinking. They also succeed in making 30-packs, party balls, and vats of punch wildly popular.

As someone who spent four of the best years of his life in a fraternity, I’m also puzzled by the increasingly draconian diktats Greeks are expected to abide by. An article by Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the New York Times Magazine this past January reported that "eleven national and international fraternities ... now require most of their chapter houses to be alcohol free, no matter what their university’s policy is."

College kids drink. It’s what they do. But instead of facing up to this reality, an increasing number of schools are making their rules more stringent. As a predictable result, more and more students do their keg stands off-campus. Citing a statistic that’s meant to exculpate Greeks, Denizet-Lewis simultaneously brings another telling number to light. "Some fraternity leaders point out that drinking-related deaths at fraternity houses make up fewer than a dozen of the 1,400 alcohol-related deaths at colleges each year (car accidents are involved in approximately 1,100 of those)." Why might car accidents account for 79 percent of alcohol-related fatalities? Could it have something to do with misguided prohibitions that, in moving alcohol consumption off campus, only increase the number of people who are getting behind the wheel?

Drinking has drawbacks, no doubt. But people will keep doing it. Wouldn’t it be sensible, rather than drawing up more rules, to follow the lead of European countries, where alcohol is a healthy and intrinsic part of day-to-day life, where teens drink wine at the dinner table, and aren’t encouraged to see alcohol as an illicit thrill? In the meantime, the news just keeps getting worse. Even Jack Daniel’s is caving. It was reported this fall that the Lynchburg, Tennessee, distillery’s Old. No. 7 Black Label "now registers 80 proof, instead of 86." Et tu, Jack?

page 2  page 3 

Issue Date: March 11 - 17, 2005
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