By Kelly Kazek
As Shirley Coffman watched her adult son relearn simple skills such as walking and eating after his car was struck by a drunk driver’s in 1990, she knew she had to tell others about the dangers of alcohol abuse.
For 10 years, the Athens resident was a member and officer of the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, offering to show statistics to anyone who would listen.
Those statistics, she believes, show that people are more likely to abuse alcohol when it is easily accessible.
“If we continue to make alcohol so readily available, we can only expect to join the statistics,” Coffman said. “We are, as a city, making alcohol so available to present and future generations to come.”
She wants alcohol sales repealed in Athens, though she cannot say with certainty people won’t drive the 10 miles or so to the county line to buy it.
“Are they going to drive to other counties to get it? I don’t know,” she said.
City residents will vote Tuesday on whether or not to continue sales, which were legalized in a vote in 2003.
Coffman’s statistics show the impact of alcohol abuse, including those on drinking and driving, alcohol-related fatalities and underage drinking.
Many families suffer because someone in their household abuses alcohol, she said.
“One family in particular, I remember the husband always kept alcohol,” she said. “They had a hard time paying their bills. I saw children sick and not able to go to the doctor for lack of money. It was a very bad situation. His children went without the clothes that were really needed. I really felt for this family.”
Proponents of keeping alcohol sales say there is a difference in abuse and drinking in moderation and that availability does not lead to abuse.
Availability = abuse?
Alcohol has long been sold in portions of Limestone County annexed by Madison, Huntsville and Decatur and before a vote legalized sales in Athens, illegal sales kept authorities busy. Sheriff Mike Blakely and Police Chief Wayne Harper say shot houses, residences used as “clubs” where people could buy and consume alcohol, did booming business before sales were legalized.
“We had plenty of liquor in this city and county when it was dry,” Harper has said.
Alcohol opponent Eddie Gooch, pastor of Isom’s Chapel United Methodist Church and leader of the group Athens-Limestone Quality of Life Committee, said he wants to make it “more difficult” for people to get alcohol.
Proponents, though, have said they believe people will continue to drive to other counties to get alcohol, which puts them on the road for more time, possibly after drinking.
David Hanson, professor emeritus of sociology at The State University of New York in Potsdam, agrees making people drive a few miles to get alcohol is no deterrent.
Hanson has studied alcohol, its abuse and its affect on society for 40 years and for 10 years has maintained the Web site Alcohol Problems and Solutions at www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/, which frequently is quoted and used for research.
“One of the things we know about dry counties, wherever they’ve been studied, is that dry counties tend to have a higher alcohol-related traffic fatality rate than do wet counties. When you think about it, it makes all the sense in the world,” he said.
“When people in dry counties go to a wet county to drink and buy alcohol to take home, they drive home through the county and are at risk for a longer period of time. They are more likely to get in a traffic accident. You’ve made it really more dangerous when you have dry area.”
The city or county loses in another way, he said: “The county loses all that revenue and economic stimulation.”
Sarah Tracy, author and associate professor of history of medicine at the University of Oklahoma Honors College, disagreed.
“Accessibility is key in any addiction,” she said. “That’s one reason why addiction is so common among physicians, for example, because they have ready access to drugs of all varieties.”
She added: “That said, if you’re carding people and have a distribution and marketing system for alcohol that is conservative and tightly run, generally that works. Any system of distribution and regulation is only as good as the people who manage it.”
Hanson says there is anecdotal evidence, such as an increase in bootlegging when legal sales are prohibited, to show that people will find a way to drink. The fact that a beverage store on U.S. 72 in Madison County, less than half a mile from the Limestone County line, went out of business soon after Athens began legal sales is one type of anecdotal evidence, he said, that shows Athenians had been buying alcohol all along, just not locally.
Jason Doss of Athens said he has watched relatives battle alcoholism and has witnessed its adverse affects, including the impact on one family member with multiple arrests for driving under the influence who has had no license for 20 years.
“That hasn’t stopped him from driving,” he said. “And it hasn’t stopped him from drinking. He still does both.”
Doss said he feels people will make the decision whether or not to drink, it’s just a matter of where they buy the alcohol.
“The way I look at it is the people out there who have that biggest problem with alcohol, they’re going to get it no matter whether they sell it in Limestone County or not,” he said. “The ones affected (if sales are repealed) are people who never had a problem with alcohol to begin with, who are just occasional drinkers. The ones who abuse it will definitely cross the county line to get it and bring it back. There’s no telling how many of those people will crack one of those beers open while they’re driving.”
In everything, moderation
For years, researchers have been studying what they believed to be a pattern in which people were more likely to abuse alcohol if they began drinking at an early age.
“Looking at preschoolers 5 years old, they can identify patterns of behavior and rather accurately predict who would have drinking problems,” Hanson said. Personality traits such as a need for immediate gratification were used to pinpoint which kids were likely to grow up to abuse alcohol.
“What appears to be happening is thrill-seeking, sensation-seeking people are more likely to begin drinking at an early age and are more likely to have drinking problems— and drive at unsafe speeds and engage in unprotected sex, gamble,” he said. “I think you’d have to be pretty foolish to think you could stop people from having drinking problems if you could stop them from drinking at an early age or limit accessibility.”
Hanson said people are more prone to abuse alcohol during certain periods in history or transitional periods in a person’s life.
“In national prohibition, we had very low availability,” he said. “Those who did drink were more likely to get into problems. People didn’t go to speak-easys to have a beer. They went there to get drunk,” he said. “People in college and in the military are more likely to drink to excess than those who go off and get a job. When they go out in the real world, they have to get up at 8 a.m.”
Hanson said drinking levels among those in their 20s drop after college graduation for that reason.
Coffman, though, says statistics from the National Center on Addiction and Abuse at Columbia University show that each day 13,000 children and teens take their first drink, and 1,400 college students die each year from inadvertent alcohol-related accidents.
“With statistics showing the numbers of abuse by having alcohol so readily available, do we want this for our children’s future as they grow into adults?” she asked.
When not abused, alcohol has a positive impact, Hanson said.
“I don’t know of any situation in which smoking tobacco in any amount is beneficial,” he said. “We do know — there is overwhelming evidence — that, if you’re not pregnant or an alcoholic or on medication, drinking alcohol in moderation clearly leads to better health. There’s not much debate any more about that.”
Studies show moderate drinking is more healthful than abstaining or drinking heavily, he said, and can have such effects as reducing incidence of stroke and heart attack.
In addition, Hanson said researchers in one study compared the number of deaths attributed to alcohol abuse and the number of lives saved by moderate consumption.
“Moderate drinking has led to saving more lives than alcohol abuse has caused,” he said.
