Brew Indy, brew!

As a person who has never smoked a cigarette in his life and who spent his youth coughing out the smoke inhaled from his parents’ Salems (Mom) and Camels (Dad), I have often remained silent on the issue of the smoking bans in bars and restaurants, even though my Liberaltarian political position makes me uneasy in regard to the government telling business owners how to run their own businesses when there is less than ample proof that society would break down without said intervention.

In my perfect world, all smokers and smoking establishments would just wake up tomorrow and say “Enough! Let’s make that one guy in Indianapolis really happy and make Smoke Free America a reality.”

I, of course, have no illusions that this will ever happen. However, every so often there is good news on the “people freely choosing to go Smoke Free” front. Earlier this week New Albanian Brewing Company decided to make their Pizzeria and Public House 100 per cent smoke free. From the Potable Curmudgeon blog:

This is our choice, and not one mandated by local government, although I concede it’s only a matter of time until the decree is issued. Although I smoke cigars, and not being able to smoke a cigar in my own bar will take some getting used to, it is my belief that the time has come to acquiesce to changing attitudes and societal norms…

The argument from workplace safety is a compelling and well nigh irrefutable one. The case aesthetically is equally convincing. The simple fact of the matter from management’s perspective is that trying to balance smoking and non-smoking needs in the context of the configuration of an establishment like ours has become maddening.

OK, so they didn’t wake up and decide to make me happy. I can live with the fact that they had other reasons. But I’m also happy they are making this choice freely, without government interference, and because they think it will improve their ability to run their business in the most efficient way they can.  It also makes me happy that a shift in societal norms regarding smoking is one of the factors here.

As a student of political science I can tell you that I have read research that suggests that legislation has very little sway over the choices we make, but, if it is promulgated at a time when public sentiment seems to be shifting anyway, it can have an exponential impact on behavior. That seems to be the case in regard to smoking bans. It isn’t that the legislation alone has caused a significant drop in smoking, but it likely has sped the transition we are living through.

But that’s a conversation for a different day and probably on a different blog.

When I last blogged for Brew Indy the hot topic was the potential award of some liquor licenses to drug-/convenience store chain Walgreens. What constitutes a salient fact for the opposition to this proposal is an ever-shifting notion. If one argument doesn’t stick, then they are more than happy to move it around; but the gist of the fracas is this:

Walgreens used to sell booze. Then they stopped. They now recognize that with other competitor chains like CVS, Kroger, Meier and Wal-Mart all selling booze, they need to get back in the game. They applied for licenses. They were just awarded 18. More are almost assuredly on their way. Each of these 18 stores were approved 4-0 by the governing licensing board on a store-by-store basis.

And why shouldn’t they have been?

As I said in my previous post on the subject, more liquor stores cannot possibly be the cause of increased alcohol drinking (except potentially in places where no such outlets are currently located) and consequently cannot be the cause of more alcohol-related crime. Now certainly there can be a correlation between higher crime and a higher liquor-store density. But, despite certain social scientists’ claim to the contrary, that’s almost certainly related to the neighborhood and not the store. That is, poorer places with higher crime are more likely to have more liquor stores (higher demand). Liquor stores do not create poverty or the crime that follows it.

Nevertheless, Neo-Prohibitionist Groups like Save My Sunday, Drug Free Marion County and Marion County Alliance of Neighborhood Associations are very much upset by the notion that Walgreens may soon supply to grown adults the products they wish to purchase with their own dollars.

I don’t have much to add to current story and so post this merely to update readers of this blog that they can now buy their liquor a little more conveniently than they used to.

A quick aside, while I find Save My Sunday and groups like it to be a made up mostly of despicable liars willing to glom on to any claim no matter how untested or unreasonable as long as it remotely seems to support their emotional disgust of liquor, groups like MCANA and even Drug Free Marion County have a lot of goals which I am in agreement with. So I don’t mean to discount the entirety of the latter two groups even as I wish they would drop their efforts against the lawful and responsible selling of alcohol. Their time, efforts, and dollars are all better spent on their more worthwhile projects.

On a related note, as a fan of craft beers and small batch liquors, I’m not super excited that Walgreens is back in the booze business. Their presence increases the amount of shelf space available to macro-manufacturers like Budweiser. It doesn’t cause an increase in consumption of liquor in general but it does shift some of the purchasing from package liquor stores to Walgreens. Since Walgreens doesn’t make a wide variety (if any) craft beers available, it potentially shifts consumption from craft beers to macros. So while I’d rather not see Walgreens in the liquor game, you don’t see me adopting specious arguments to advocate for my position. It just means that in venues like Brew Indy and in person, I will just have to ramp up my honest advocacy efforts.

In regard to Jimmy’s post yesterday I have a few more comments.

Save My Sunday, my new whipping post, has a lot to say regarding whether Walgreens should be granted the retailer liquor license they have applied for which would allow them to sell liquor in most of their 53 central Indiana stores and 200 statewide. As a group that nominally opposes liquor sales on Sunday but clearly wishes to abolish liquor sales altogether, they are of the mind that Walgreens’s application should be denied.

Their logic is that an increase in liquor outlets, by making alcohol more easily obtainable, will increase drunkeness and the problems associated with it. They have been saying this for awhile now, but earlier this week two Indiana University professors helped them out by putting some science behind the theory.

According to Criminal Justice professor William Alex Pridemore and Department of Geography professor Tony Grubesic, in a briefing presented as part of the Feb. 18-22 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, California and in a press briefing on February 22, an additional off-premise liquor outlet in a square mile block is associated with an additional 2.3 simple assaults per year. An additional restaurant is associated with 1.15 additional simple assaults and a bar with 1.35 additional assaults.

Now statistics are statistics, and I’m not here to deny that these two professors are fine collectors and analysts of data. I’m sure they are. But statistics don’t show or prove causation. Causation must be theorized from the available data and then tested. All this study can prove is that there is a relationship between crime and liquor outlet density. That relationship does not have to be causal. But Pridemore and Grubesic, according to this summary of the paper, seem to believe that the liquor stores do more than serve as a marker of high crime areas and in fact claim,

We could expect a reduction of about one-quarter in simple assaults and nearly one-third in aggravated assaults in our sample of Cincinnati block groups were alcohol outlets removed entirely.

The causative mechanism according to the authors is

A higher density of alcohol sales outlets in an area means closer proximity and easier availability to an intoxicating substance for residents,” Pridemore said. “Perhaps just as importantly, alcohol outlets provide a greater number of potentially deviant places. Convenience stores licensed to sell alcohol may be especially troublesome in this regard, as they often serve not only as sources of alcohol but also as local gathering places with little formal social control. [emphasis mine]

This seems pretty flimsy to me from an economic standpoint. Even on the Saturday night before the Super Bowl, package liquor stores are always well stocked. So in terms of available liquor, we live in a world where our physical supply routinely outpaces our consumption. If you added a liquor store across the street from another outlet, you have not made booze any more convenient or cheap and you have barely altered the landscape in regard to proximity of sale. It is true, as the author’s suggest, that you do create an additional space where people that desire alcohol will run into each other, “potential deviant places” which is something I will come back to. And keep in mind, the professors were talking about blocks of one square mile, a perimeter so vast it can be walked in an hour.

It seems to me that a higher density of liquor stores are not the cause of higher incidents of assaults, but rather architectural signals of, well, not to put too fine a point on it, worse sides of town. That is, retail outlets don’t spring up haphazardly; they go where the demand is. Put another way, a high liquor store density tells you that you are in a high crime area, not that liquor is the cause of that crime, which renders the authors’ supposed reduction in crime from reducing the amount of granted liquor licenses absurd. No one remembers Prohibition as being a low crime moment in America’s history. That experiment has already been run.

Without seeing the presentation myself I can’t know for sure if the authors accounted for the notion that an additional liquor store in a bad neighborhood was also an additional target of a robbery. That is, 2.3 additional assaults per yer isn’t that big of an increase. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that if we were to obtain the raw data and remove from the population all burglaries/robberies of liquor stores that the effect would be reduced to near zero. (Note: the summary of the paper linked here doesn’t say “per year.” It just says 2.3 additional assaults. Without a time paramter that statement doesn’t make any sense. I could be drastically underestimating the increase in assaults here and will correct it when and if I find a reason to.)

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume the authors are correct, that by reducing the amount of licenses one can actually reduce crime, does it follow that the correct course of action is to deny Walgreens their license?

I would argue that it does not. As Jimmy pointed out yesterday, this would be a governmental action that is discriminatory against Walgreens specifically and cannot be supported by law. CVS, Kroger, Meijer, and several other outlets all already sell liquor and Walgreens is at least as responsible as any of them, probably more so given CVS’s ethical problems of the last decade. And why would you want to keep Walgreens out of the game? All this will do will transfer some of CVS’s, Kroger’s, and Meijer’s profits over to Walgreens. That’s why they’re so up in arms over Walgreen’s return to the liquor game.

Rather the proper response, if the authors are correct, would be to simply reduce the amount of licenses allowed and let Walgreens obtain a license wherever one was available. Which presumably is what John Livengood would agree to since, by his reading of current Indiana law, there are already too many licenses issued and so Walgreens would be SOL. I don’t know if he’s right or not, but as Jimmy mentioned yesterday and as the Star reported, at least one judge thinks he’s wrong.

And speaking of Mr. Livengood, he cracks me up. If you were to read this line from him, “A corporation that once said it would never sell alcohol is now essentially turning its once family-friendly drugstores into liquor stores,” [emphasis mine]wouldn’t you suppose he was one of Save My Sunday’s bloggers? Wouldn’t you think he was a neo-Prohibitionist of some sort, full of loathing for those despicable outlets that profiteer off man’s vices?

Well guess what! He’s the CEO of the Indiana Association of Beverage Retailers, and by “beverage” they mean alcoholic beverages. He has his dog in the fight, sure, but trying to appeal to our emotional sense to convince us that the only acceptable place to buy liquor is a liquor store, just seems in bad form. I quickly add, though, that I do think the best place to buy liquor is a liquor store. People who follow liquor trends and talk directly to liquor consumers can impart a wealth of knowledge to the curious shopper. CVS employees, as nice as they are often are, just aren’t very helpful when you need to know which box wine goes best with chicken breast baked in cream of mushroom soup. (Pssst, I’d go with the Target brand Wine Cube California Chardonnay.)

This may not come as a shock to you if you follow Indiana beer news, but Indiana has it’s own group of honest to goodness neo-Prohibitionists.

Before I proceed, as this term is likely to pop up often, I want to explain what I mean by it. I am an alcohol fan. I like beer enough to make road trips to breweries so I can try their beer at its freshest; I make my own beer; and spend my free time reading about beer culture and history.

I like whiskey. If I could legally make my own and if I could afford my own still (or had the technical skill to make one) I would do that too. As it is, I have spent my hard earned money to buy and sample a variety of different types and brands of whiskey. I often go to bookstores so I can read reviews of whiskeys I can’t afford or haven’t heard of before.

I know the histories and major varieties of nearly all spirits and many bitters.

I like wine. I know the basics and I wouldn’t embarrass myself at a fancy dinner if the waiter shoved a cork in my face.

This isn’t bragging. This is me explaining where I’m coming from when I start to use a term that many might think of as derogatory.

With that said, I know there are some problems associated with immoderate drinking, problems of the mind, problems of the body, problems in our families, problems with our friends and problems with which our expanded communities wrestle. I have friends that are or have been alcoholics and I have seen them arrested for DUIs, lose their jobs, break their marriages. I have even seen friends use alcohol as a replacement for much harder drugs and eventually return to them when alcohol stopped filling that void for them. More of my family members are alcoholics than I would like to admit.

With all that said, alcohol is not the problem. Alcoholism comes from a dark place born in pain, loss, anxiety, or despair.

But more importantly I am also aware of some facts. Binge drinkers, when that term is defined fairly and usefully, make up the margins of all drinkers, the vast majority of which partake moderately in what is one of Earth’s great luxuries. And alcoholics make up the margins of all binge drinkers. Alcoholics are the margin of the margins. They are extreme and rare.

So when I talk about neo-Prohibitionists I want to make very clear that I am not talking about every individual or group that recognizes that alcohol should be regulated by a healthy society because there are known harms associated with its immoderate and unsafe use.

Who I am talking about when I am talking about neo-Prohibitionist are groups and individuals whose ultimate goal is to ban entirely all alcohol sales and use. Some of these groups are very clear that they see no good in alcohol and want it banned completely or regulated slowly away. Many of these groups are not so upfront. Their stated purpose  is to “regulate” alcohol. Or to “limit” its availability. They only want to curb the use of “excessive” drinking. They may say they merely want to “postpone” the introduction of alcohol to young people. These are goals, that, if they truly worked toward them would be goals I could support. They hide their extremism behind a mask of reasonableness.

Hardly any American with a basic elementary school-level education doesn’t know that we tried Prohibition once and rather than cure the nation of the scourge of liquor, it actually exacerbated the problem and elevated the wealth and power of organized criminal associations. That means the arguments of neo-Prohibitionists of the first type above are easy to dismiss.

Those of the second type, however are more insidious. Alcohol has been effectively demonized which makes it hard for politicians to set their emotions aside and pass helpful legislation. These craftier neo-Prohibitionists prey on this fear and confusion, routinely using rhetorical techniques, fallacious arguments, and statistical tricks to undermine even modest drinking by legal, responsible adults to slowly work toward their goals under the guise of “responsible regulation.” They have to use these underhanded tactics because they know their ultimate goal flies in the face of judicious restraint, logic, and, frankly, reality.

Let me introduce you to one such group that I plan on spending a lot of time on in the next few weeks. Save My Sunday.

Save My Sunday describes themselves this way:

Save My Sunday is a blog devoted to the joys of reserving one day a week for rest, rejuvenation and family.

This sounds limited enough. I don’t agree with their premise, I see very little joy in depriving others of their freedoms, but here we could just agree to disagree, and besides, maybe they have some good evidence of why I might think twice about legalizing Sunday sales.

They continue:

We decided to start it when we heard about a push in Indiana to legalize the sale of alcohol on Sundays.

As a marketer and a writer who has helped several organizations create strong mission statements I have nothing but good things to say about Save My Sunday providing their audience the impetus of the group. In debate we would call this “the threat.” As Save My Sunday is in the role of the affirmative here, that is making the argument in the affirmative, “Yes, Indiana should continue to keep Sunday sales of liquor illegal,” the burden is on them to prove that Sunday sales constitutes a threat. We will see how they attempt to do this through analysis of the site.

They continue.

Convenience is great in the 24-7 world we live in, but we believe Sunday is the one day we should spend quality time with family and friends, worship when and where we can, and generally focus on what is good and healthy. In this fast-paced world, our lives are complicated enough. Let’s leave Sunday alone.

This is where their argument flies off the rails and will leave them no choice but to resort to the worst of kind argument from emotion, specious analogies, ad hominem attacks, false equivalencies and more. You see, legalizing Sunday sales would not prevent them from “spend[ing] quality time with family friends, worship[ing] when and were [they] can, and generally focus[ing] on what is good and healthy” and yet they act like they couldn’t enjoy last Sunday because I had a beer. As H.L. Mencken might have said, a neo-Prohibitionist “is a person who lives in the fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.”

Buried in their claim is that time spent drinking, even responsibly with friends and family, is not quality time. That, drinking itself, even in moderate doses, is not healthy. That somehow, drinking, speeds up our fast-paced world.

So many false claims. So many opinions based on deliberately ignoring the way most of the world, who are often found relaxing with delicious, healthy alcoholic beverages with friends enjoy their Sundays or even their Mondays through their Saturdays.

But most importantly, because they do not relax with alcohol, because they do not think it is healthy (besides a mountain of evidence to the contrary), they think it is their right to keep others from living differently, as if the fact that I bought a six pack on Sunday would somehow affect them.

This is just the beginning. I had planned on criticizing just one of their blog posts but as I scanned their site for the name of the author of the posts, I became more and more incensed at the manipulation and dishonesty I found there. Save my Sunday and I are going to spend a lot of time together. I hope you stay tuned.