Indefatigable watchdogs Buster (angry) and Sergio (stoked) rate last year's major developments in the California alcohol landscape. Sergio prevents; Buster just vents. — Your Childhood, But Alcoholic The past year marked a true explosion in alcoholic products carrying established non-alcoholic brands. From Coca-Cola to SunnyD to Dunkin Donuts, the alcohol industry doubled down on the concept of “take your childhood, and get you drunk with it.” While the category is loose—sometimes collapsed with hard seltzers and/or ready-to-drink cocktails—market research firm Precedence Research estimated ..read more

Indefatigable watchdogs Buster (angry) and Sergio (stoked) rate last year's major developments in the California alcohol landscape. Sergio prevents; Buster just vents. — The Indefinite Extension of Regulatory Relief How soon we forget. When the COVID-19 outbreak started spreading in California in March of 2020, Governor Newsom issued a stay-at-home order that severely restricted public gathering places, notably including restaurants and bars. To offset this, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control issued a number of “regulatory relief” orders, allowing these retailers newfou ..read more

Advocacy’s Bark and Industry’s Bite Alcohol research, policy, and advocacy is, at times, a dog’s life. As 2023 came to a close, Alcohol Justice and the California Alcohol Policy Alliance looked back at a year in which some passionate efforts came to naught, while remarkable successes came from unexpected quarters. In the face of a complex, ongoing struggle to promote public health and community empowerment, we can roll over, or we can sit up, speak out, and try to bring the forces of deregulation to heel. But sometimes even the most dedicated advocate can be reluctant to learn new tricks. That ..read more

For most youth, sports are a learning opportunity.* Adults expound on the obvious lessons: preparation, determination, cooperation. When it comes to the alcohol industry, however, there are hidden lessons: normalization, intention, brand recognition. Alcohol ads and branding in media favored by youth have a demonstrated impact on how early and how enthusiastically kids start drinking. The converse question is, what has an impact on what gets kids to prefer not to drink? The Super Bowl serves as a flashpoint for this tension. As the most-watched television block every year, the Bowl draws milli ..read more

Students of the California State University (CSU) system keep finding themselves pieces in Sacramento’s bleak budgetary chess. Last year, the legislature passed AB 840, which closed revenue holes by handing Big Alcohol carte blanche to market directly to underage undergraduates. To follow that up, California Governor Gavin Newsom clawed back $499 million from the system to balance the 2024 budget. The solution for both—one that neither kicks needed funding down the road, nor increases risks of academic failure and physical harm to students—comes from a simple, popular, yet apparently perversel ..read more

The quietest people at the table would like to become the loudest ones in the legislative chamber. In 2020, researchers and alcohol control professionals led by Dr. Sean Haley of the City University of New York, and Cassandra Toure of the National Alcoholic Beverage Control Association formed the Alcohol Action Network (AAN). Run from within the American Public Health Association, AAN was dedicated to the proposition that, when it comes to alcohol, the most competent public health researchers and advocates are often at a loss when it comes to policy change. Through capacity building, skill sha ..read more

Few consequences of alcohol consumption are as dramatic and tragic as motor vehicle collisions. As of 2021,13,384 people died in alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes in the United States, one every 39 minutes. And while the operatic image of an incoherent vilain speeding the wrong way on the highway remains the popular perception, in fact, over 2,200 crashes involve drivers with BACs under 0.08, the current legal limit. Even a moderate tweak to the BAC level would save lives, and has the potential for protective knock-on effects as well. This is not a radical proposal. The majority of high ..read more

It's not clear if violinists are well represented in Sacramento, but someone is certainly fiddling while the alcohol burns. Coming out of COVID-19 (if indeed we have), the alcohol-related death rate in the state has spiraled.  As recently as 2015, around 11,000 Californians died from alcohol-involved causes yearly.  In 2021, California Department of Public Health officials estimated the death toll as high as 19,335 annually. This raised an urgent question: has California's lawmaking exacerbated this trend, or helped keep it from being higher yet? Alcohol Justice's new report, Circli ..read more

The 2023 California legislative session wrapped up at the end of October. It was a strange one, marked by Governor Gavin Newsom going on a veto spree, knocking off nearly 30% of the bills presented to him over a 3-day period. But as we feared from an executive whose private success has come through the alcohol industry, the red pen did not touch any of the concerning alcohol-related bills.Of the 29 bills tracked by Alcohol Justice this year, none were vetoed, and 18 (62%) were signed into law. All of California's alcohol-related bills, including summaries and our analysis, are compiled on the ..read more

In late May, Ireland made regulatory history by becoming the first country to enact stringent alcohol warning label requirements. Going well beyond the small, cramped, and oft-ignored warnings on U.S. bottles, the Irish warnings were eyecatching, comprehensive--including cancer risk--and provided a number of different labels in rotation. All of these were in accordance with the emerging global best practices around effective health education, and intended to stem the growing alcohol morbidity and mortality in the country. Needless to say, the industry quickly moved to assert a popular, effect ..read more