Wet versus dry? Study compares traffic fatalities
Posted on Sunday, September 10, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/166104/
Residents of Arkansas’ dry counties are no safer from death in a traffic accident involving someone who had been drinking than those in wet counties, five years of federal accident statistics show.
The fear of drunken driving is a rallying cry for opponents to the spread of restaurants licensed to serve alcohol in dry counties, but an analysis of the data shows that easier access to alcohol coincides with a lower risk of death in an alcohol-related crash.
From 2000 to 2004, 4. 2 people per 10, 000 population died in accidents involving an inebriated driver or pedestrian in the state’s 32 wet counties, according to an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette analysis of federal statistics.
The death rate for the same years in the state’s 43 dry counties was noticeably higher, at 4. 6 deaths per 10, 000 people. Of these, the rate grew to 4. 9 deaths per 10, 000 population in the 11 counties where no alcohol is legally sold at all.
Statewide, 1, 187 people died in alcohol-related car accidents from 2000 to 2004, for a rate of 4. 4 deaths per 10, 000 people.
Because factors besides alcohol contribute to wrecks, the statistics don’t prove that meager access to alcohol causes more crashes. But the difference between the death rates in dry and wet counties undercuts a key argument advanced by opponents of expanded alcohol sales that they will pose a significant risk of increased drunken driving.
The question of whether greater access to alcohol causes more drunken driving is increasingly relevant this year: Dry Marion County will decide in November whether to go wet, and supporters are gathering signatures for a vote to decide if Clark County should also go wet. Meanwhile, more restaurants in dry counties are applying for licenses to sell alcohol under a 2003 law intended to promote tourism and attract businesses. In Batesville, Benton, Conway, Malvern and Jonesboro — all cities in dry counties — restaurants that have obtained private club permits can now serve alcoholic beverages.
“Obviously it doesn’t help my point any to have those figures,” said Jack Jefferson, a Marion County Baptist minister fighting the November ballot referendum in that county.
For its analysis, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette obtained five years of data on alcohol-related fatal automobile crashes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and county population estimates from the Census Bureau from 2000 to 2004 — the most recent period for which the traffic statistics were available. The Democrat-Gazette then grouped the dry and wet counties separately, and compared the rates.
David Hogue, a Conway attorney who frequently represents alcohol opponents in Alcoholic Beverage Control hearings, said that the lower death rate in wet counties doesn’t show the whole picture.
“If fatalities were all that we were talking about... then I would say, ‘Yeah, you win the argument, ’” Hogue said. “But that’s not the only issue when we talk about the safety of dryness.”
Hogue wants to see statistics, which are currently unavailable, comparing all accidents in dry and wet counties where alcohol is a factor, not just those crashes that end in death.
In addition, he said, problems associated with expanded alcohol sales don’t occur just on the road. “Alcoholism, divorces, child abuse, it’s just a domino effect,” he said. Andy Berry, an Arkadelphia lawyer who gathered signatures to put a wet-dry vote on the November ballot in dry Clark County, said a higher death rate in dry counties won’t necessarily sway his adversaries, many of whom are motivated by a deep-seeded moral opposition to alcohol. “There is going to be a percentage that is not going to look at it at all,” said Berry.
In Marion County, Jim Wilson Jr., a justice of the peace who led the petition drive to put a wetdry vote on the November ballot, says alcohol foes exaggerate the peril of drunken driving and other ill effects of alcohol sales to push their point, so the federal statistics don’t surprise him.
“The theory is that because it’s available, you’re going to create a bunch of drunks,” he said. “I can’t buy that.”
Conway Mayor Tab Townsell, who lent his support to an Outback Steakhouse restaurant that ultimately won an alcohol permit there, said the statistics do surprise him because they run counter to the “conventional wisdom” that dry counties are safer.
“We’ve just naturally assumed that,” he said. The statistics, “change the shape of the argument. You can’t just make this blatant statement that all of a sudden the county’s going to be more unsafe” when restaurants sell alcohol.
Teresa Belew, executive director of the Arkansas chapter of MADD, said the organization doesn’t take sides in the wet-dry debate, because neither option avoids the risk of impaired motorists. She focuses her group’s opposition on high-risk alcohol sales licenses, such as in venues on college campuses.
In Arkansas’ dry counties, only private clubs can legally sell alcoholic beverages, and only to members and guests. But in recent years, alcoholsales supporters have stepped up their campaign to loosen the legal barriers to the flow of liquor, beer and wine, arguing that freer regulations will attract more businesses whose employees want a drink.
One contentious change was a 2003 law intended to promote tourism and attract employers to dry areas by making it easier for restaurants there to sell alcoholic drinks — by getting licensed as a private club.
The Alcoholic Beverage Control Administration, the state body that issues licenses to sell alcohol, doesn’t track the number of dry-county restaurants that have received alcohol sales permits since passage of the new law, but a Democrat-Gazette review of division records found roughly 40 in Benton, Craighead, Faulkner, Hot Spring and Independence counties. In all, more than 650 private clubs in Arkansas can sell alcohol — including 102 in Benton County, the wettest of the dry counties.
Most of those faced heated, emotionally charged opposition in the agency hearing room, often led by church groups who acknowledge their moral and religious disapproval of alcohol consumption.
Through his Christian Legal Service firm, Hogue, the Conway attorney, has been active in several unsuccessful attempts to prevent alcohol sales in restaurants in Conway, Jonesboro and Malvern.
At a hearing last month at which the Alcoholic Beverage Control ultimately awarded a Malvern steak and seafood restaurant a license to sell beer and wine, Hogue argued that alcohol sales in a separate 30-seat section of the popular eatery would imperil motorists in dry Hot Spring County.
“You cannot drink alcohol without an altered state of mind when you get behind the wheel,” said Hogue, 36, at the hearing.
As restaurants continue to apply for private-club permits in dry counties, Robert Moore, director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control administrative division, said the difference in alcoholrelated traffic deaths could be introduced to undermine liquor foes’ claims.
“It’ll be an interesting point of evidence,” Moore said.
Studies indicate that Arkansans don’t drink much alcohol as compared to residents of other states.
Only 41 percent of Arkansans report drinking an alcoholic beverage in the past month, compared to the national average of 50 percent, according to a recent survey by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Despite their relative reluctance to imbibe, Arkansans are also more likely to die in alcohol-related accidents than others, suggesting that other factors besides drinking contribute to the high death rate.
In 2004, the most recent year for which data are available from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 276 people died in alcohol-related crashes in Arkansas, for a rate of one death per 10, 000 population. That’s almost twice the national rate.
Among Arkansas’ neighboring states, only Mississippi — where 37 percent of the population had a drink in the past month — has a higher rate of alcohol-related traffic deaths, about 1. 2 people per 10, 000 population in 2004. In Texas, the rate was about 0. 7 people per 10, 000. Louisiana’s death rate in alcohol-related crashes was 0. 9 people out of 10, 000.
The most alcohol-friendly state in the nation appears to be Wisconsin, where 62 percent drank an alcoholic beverage in the past month. But, in that state, only about 0. 7 residents per 10, 000 died in drunken-driving deaths in 2004.
Drunk or sober, a greater proportion of Arkansans die in automobile accidents than in almost any other state: In 2004, Arkansas was fourth highest in the nation in all traffic deaths relative to population.
People on all sides of the alcohol issue acknowledge that drycounty drinkers have no trouble finding a place to imbibe.
They drink in neighboring wet counties or buy a membership in a private club licensed to sell alcohol. They buy packaged beer, wine and spirits in a wet county, then bring it home to drink in backyards, hunting camps or tailgate parties.
In dry White County Sgt. Brian Duke said that in most of the drunken-driving arrests he makes, the suspects had just left one of four private clubs in the county, including a country club, two VFW posts and an Elks lodge. He estimated that a quarter to a third of the suspects just left private functions.
White County Sheriff Pat Garrett said people charged with drunken driving there got that way at night clubs or bars in Pulaski County. Some buy beer, liquor or wine at a store there.
“A lot of them will start drinking it before they get here,” Garrett said.
In the Natural State’s sparsely populated countryside — like elsewhere in the rural south — people who do drink outside of the home have farther to drive on the return, said a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
“We get in our cars and have to go a ways to get to bars and to get to friends’ houses,” said the spokesman, Bruce Shults, who is based in Fort Worth.
Arkansas’ dry counties tend to be more rural and sparsely populated than the wet ones in which seven of the state’s 10 largest cities are situated. Sixty-one percent of the dry population lives in rural areas, compared with 36 percent of the wet population, census data show.
Alcohol foe Bob Hester, who has lobbied against the granting of alcohol sales licenses at restaurants in dry counties, speculated that hilly terrain in dry counties leads to more alcoholrelated traffic deaths than in wet ones. Most of the wet counties are situated on flat Delta farmland — compared to the hillier country of many dry counties.
“Logically, the roads in the hills are much more dangerous and harder to negotiate than roads in the Delta,” Hester wrote in an e-mail. “That fact alone could be the cause of the seeming disparity between alcohol-related deaths in wet and dry counties.”