Alcohol Justice and other anti-alcohol advocacy groups released reports warning that a California Senate bill extending alcohol sales to 4 a.m. would “launch a dangerous seven-city, five-year experiment that could expose more than 78% of California’s population to increased alcohol-related harm.
“In the past ten years, at least five major studies have reviewed all the evidence around late last call times. Every one of them concluded they lead to more violence, crime, victimization, crashes, and injury,” said Carson Benowitz-Fredericks, Research Manager, Alcohol Justice, lead author of the latest study, The Late Night Threat: Science, Harms and Costs of Extending Bar Service Hours.
“California is supposed to be a place where evidence-based policy beats out cash-based policy. SB 905’s authors need to take the harms from alcohol as seriously as they take the dinners from lobbyists,” she said.
Benowitz’s study says that peer-reviewed research over the past 40 years shows that changes in last call times of two hours or more are associated with an increase in alcohol-related automobile crashes and tickets for driving under the influence.
It also makes these points:
- Ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft and insufficient to counter intoxicated driving trends.Night owl mass transportation s largely unavailable, it adds.
- Because fatigue and alcohol interact, late-night bar times can create deadly drivers even at the current legal 0.08 blood alcohol content standard
- Early morning last calls can overlap with early morning commuters and school activities, removing insulation between late-night drinkers and daytime activity.
- Research in Australia and Norway suggests later last call times increase violence by 17%– 50%, while early ones reduce it by 19%–37% per hour of change.
- Because intoxicated drivers travel to seek out open bars late at night, different last call times between areas make alcohol harms “splash” onto all nearby communities.
- Greater late-night drinking makes it harder for police to operate effectively and can severely impact emergency room (ER) capacity.
The report concludes by recommending the state “reject local control rhetoric” and maintain last call times at 2 a.m. or earlier.