Boris Hernandez
Sociology
Professor Thea Alvarado
04-15-16
The Effects of Enforcement on Merchant Compliance with the Minimum Legal Drinking Age
By
Richard Scribner and Deborah Cohen
Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) laws have been recognized as an effective way to prevent alcohol to be consumed by underage persons. Such controversial laws punished every state that allowed persons below 21 years to purchase and publicly possess alcoholic beverages; however, as Richard Scribner and Deborah Cohen state, it was unclear how effective these laws are; therefore, the ambiguity of the minimum legal drinking age laws have led researchers to speculate the effectiveness of enforcement strategies targeting underage consumers.
Therefore, a quasi-experiment using a repeated-intervention design was conducted for a random sample of 143 of off sale alcohol outlets from across New Orleans in 1995. Compliance checks of off-sale outlets were conducted at baseline, two months after the intervention and eight months after the intervention. It is important to point out that minimum legal drinking age laws are unique in that discouragement strategies can target either the underage consumer or the alcohol retailer. According to Richard and Deborah, deterring underage youth from purchasing alcohol using citations and arrests represents a deterrence strategy that directly targets the population at risk, which is underage youth; whereas deterring alcohol retailers from selling alcohol to youth using fines and/or license suspension/revocations represents a general deterrence strategy that indirectly targets underage youth by decreasing its availability of alcohol in the environment.
Unfortunately, as researchers demonstrated, enforcement agencies preferred targeting underage youth rather than alcohol retailers. For example, in 1995, Wagener and Wolfson found that two of every 1,000 occasions of underage drinking result in an underage arrest while five in every 100,000 occasions result in action against an alcohol retailer. The main reason why the experiment and study was conducted in New Orleans, Louisiana, was because between 1988 and 1990, Louisiana had the lowest rate of enforcement of Minimum Legal Drinking Age law of any of U.S. state. This particular study was designed to assess the impact of compliance checks both on alcohol retailers cited for non-compliance and alcohol retailers only exposed to the media coverage of the issuing of citations in the New Orleans area.
Originally, a sample of 155 off-sale alcohol outlets was randomly selected from the universe of all off-sale alcohol outlets. Over the course of the project, 12 outlets either closed down or stop selling alcohol. As a result, only data for the 143 remaining outlets were available at all three waves. None of the outlets that stopped selling alcohol was closed due to enforcement of alcohol regulations. The intervention was conducted in association with the Louisiana Department of Alcohol Beverages Control (ABC). The media advocacy component was conducted two months after the baseline compliance checks and was organized around the delivery of citations by ABC agents to a sub sample of all non-compliant outlets at baseline. The event was well-covered by the media, involving a press conference attended by the Mayor and the State ABC Commissioner followed by a press “ride along” in which ABC officials delivered the citations to outlets owners. The story was covered on all three television networks that evening and the New Orleans major daily newspaper covered the story on the front page.
The first wave of compliance checks demonstrated low levels of compliance by alcohol retailer. At time 0, only 16 of the 143 (11.3%) of the outlets visited asked for age identification. Five months after the first wave of compliance checks and four weeks after the media advocacy component, the second wave of compliance was conducted. At time 1, 57 of the 143 outlets (39.9%) asked for an identification, representing a significant increase in compliance compared with compliance at time 0. As Richard Scribner and Deborah Cohen suggest, it is important to acknowledge that the success of the enforcement intervention to the effectiveness of discouragement strategies targeting illegal behavior that is primarily influenced by economic cost-benefit realities. News coverage, also played an important role in the success of the intervention in whether or not an outlet received a citation.
Discussion questions:
1)What were the limitations of the study?
2)How effective are the effects of enforcement?
3)Why did the study take place in New Orleans?