The Cruel Trade: With AB 840, Big Alcohol Buys Underage Eyes

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The alcohol industry is running an experiment, of the kind sometimes carried out in college psych labs. In this experiment, a young student—19 or 20 years old—is shown a lever. The experimenter urges them to pull it. If they do, they are subjected to a random outcome: they might feel happy, or nauseous, or they will receive a shock, and, rarely, killed.

This seems absurd, cruel, and reckless, a deeply unethical experiment, even more so if it happens to be run at the financial behest of a donor. But at Big Alcohol's behest, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is doing just that kind of experiment. They are pushing to be allowed to sell alcohol advertising throughout the recreational facilities used by the school’s undergraduates, many of whom are below the legal drinking age.

“Alcohol ads are not neutral,” said Cruz Avila, Executive Director of Alcohol Justice. “They are meant to persuade, and they don’t ID someone before they persuade them. As a father who has studied and researched the consequences of reckless drinking on underage Californians, it’s unforgivable that a school would sell its students to Budweiser for pocket change.”

Cal Poly, along with seven other California State University campuses as well as St. Mary’s College of California, are sponsors of AB 840, a bill authored by Democratic Assemblymember Dawn Addis that will let the universities sell space to alcohol advertisers in stadiums and event centers. The universities are pushing for this in a desperate scrounge for funding. In testimony before the California Senate Governmental Operations Committee, Cal Poly Assistant VP of Strategic Business Services Dru Zackmeyer noted that “operating budgets are always tight. Sponsorships with local alcoholic beverage suppliers and manufacturers based in part on advertising opportunities… provide hundreds of thousands of discretionary dollars.”

Yet Zackmeyer also acknowledged that these advertising policies would not just put college students in the crosshairs. University facilities serve as community hubs, including for youth gatherings. Zackmeyer noted that the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center would be a beneficiary of these ads, and would in turn spend that money to “allow 12,000 K through 12 students to experience live educational arts performances.”¹

The rationale—market alcohol to middle schoolers so you can maintain a facility to market alcohol to middle schoolers—would be merely bleak if it were financially effective. But the actual effectiveness of this strategy was questioned by the California Assembly Appropriations Committee analysis which noted the yearly revenue would be “…potentially in the low millions of dollars annually.” For context, the CSU System budget is $12.4 billion per year. And this is only cost neutral if, in fact, alcohol advertising has no effect, particularly on the 40% of the CSU system under 21.² Research shows, however that this is not the case.

Alcohol marketing absolutely impacts underage young adults. Studies have shown that exposure to alcohol ads increases intention to drink and likelihood of binge drinking³—and an 18-year-old high school senior is just as vulnerable to this as an 18-year-old college freshman. When you raise alcohol consumption in this cohort, you raise the consequences, and those consequences range from uncomfortable to lethal.

Alcohol consumption in college is associated with a range of concerns, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Aside from simple academic problems as a consequence of drinking, collegiate alcohol use is associate with legal problems, violent assault, and sexual assault.⁴ In the worst case, alcohol can become a killer.

Or to look at it the other way, when the worst case occurs, it very likely derives from alcohol use. The top three causes of death for those underage are alcohol related: motor vehicle crashes, homicide, and suicide.⁵ As the opioid crisis bleeds into all facets of modern life, so too do alcohol-involved overdoses spike among young people. In these cases, alcohol’s tendency to make the body more sensitive to opioids and other downers turns nonlethal doses fatal.

It is easy but callous to brush these aside as the consequences of individual bad decisions. And historically, Big Alcohol has used that framework to avoid regulation that could reduce these life-altering outcomes.⁶ But in the case of college students, the consequences are often imposed by the university itself. Most universities have codes of conduct that preclude underage drinking on campus, with consequences up to and including expulsion.

“It is absolutely Kafkaesque to urge someone to do something that you intend to punish them for,” said Carson Benowitz-Fredericks, Research Director at Alcohol Justice. “It’s frankly cruel for CSU to take money to urge 19-year-olds to drink, suspend them for listening, and then tell them it’s all for their own benefit.”

Because of the harm to students from drinking and the harm to the university from students leaving the system, it becomes increasingly difficult to realize the economic advantage. At last estimate, underage drinking cost California $7.3 billion, including underage college students.⁷

The CSU system still fights its own battles against rampant disruption and death due to alcohol, as exemplified by the plight of San Diego State University in the wake of its own exemption from alcohol advertising restrictions.⁸ And the system at large has dedicated $25 million—far, far more than will be brought in by advertising to its students—to address rampant sexual misconduct concerns.⁹ Since so many of these consequences are tied to drinking, it puts CSU in a bind.

Either:
- The alcohol advertising is ineffective, in which case the ads will be pulled and they will lose the money, or
- The alcohol advertising is effective, in which case consumption goes up, the costs and fallout goes up, and CSU loses more money than it raises.

The alcohol industry clearly thinks the advertising will work. Industry documents show they are well aware that their products and campaigns capture the attention of people who are too young to drink.¹⁰ By simply splashing them up in a mixed crowd—40% underage, 60% legal age—they can claim they were only trying to market to those 21 years of age and older. Worse, AB 840 gives Big Alcohol permission to violate even their own voluntary marketing restrictions. When asked to set a limit for underage audience for alcohol ads, the industry vowed not to use a channel where more than 28.4% of the audience was underage.¹¹ The audience at CSU, of course, is 40% underage.

“I can see the industry saying, ‘If CSU doesn’t care, why should we?” said Michael Scippa, Public Affairs Director for Alcohol Justice. “If CSU doesn’t care about kids dropping out, crashing their cars, getting assaulted… why should Big Alcohol?”

Alcohol Justice and the California Alcohol Policy Alliance ask concerned community members to reach out to Assemblymember Addis, representatives at Cal Poly, and legislative leaders in Sacramento, to tell them to stop sacrificing youth on the altar of alcohol industry profits. This has hurt too many California kids before and will do it again. Whatever the money offered, the real price is too steep.

To send a message to Sacramento, TAKE ACTION here: http://bit.ly/44n481d

REFERENCES

1. California State Senate Governmental Operations Committee. July 11, 2023 legislative session. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rttXJJUIHE. (Comments start at 1’18”.)

2. California Polytechnic State University. (2023). “Institutional Research.” Available at: https://ir.calpoly.edu/content/publications_reports/polyview/index. Accessed August 11, 2023.

3. Jernigan, D., Noel, J., Landon, J., Thornton, N., & Lobstein, T. (2017). Alcohol marketing and youth alcohol consumption: a systematic review of longitudinal studies published since 2008. Addiction, 112, 7-20.

4. National Institute on Alcoholic Abuse and Alcoholism. (2023). “Harmful and Underage College Drinking.” Available at: https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/college-drinking. Accessed August 11, 2023.

5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC WONDER. Available at: https://wonder.cdc.gov/. Accessed August 11, 2023.

6. Mialon, M. & McCambridge, J. (2018) Alcohol industry corporate social responsibility initiatives and harmful drinking: a systematic review. European Journal of Public Health, 28(4), 664-73.

7. Miller, TR, Levy, DT, Spicer, RS, & Taylor, DM. (2006) Societal costs of underage drinking. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 67(4) 519-28.

8. Ramirez, J. “Vodka Billboard with SDSU Athletics Logo Stirs Controversy.” November 15, 2022. CBS. Available at: https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/vodka-billboard-with-sdsu-logo-stirs-controversy/509-2224c972-a3d1-44e5-8019-e7d484de43b9. Accessed August 22, 2023.

9. Zinshteyn, M. “How Many Cal State Employees Are Accused of Sexual Harassment? Here’s Why It’s Hard to Know.” August 7, 2023. Cal Matters. Available at: https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2023/08/sexual-harassment/. Accessed August 22, 2023.

10. Hill, S.C., Thomsen, S.R., Page, R.M., & Parrott, N. (2005). Alcohol advertisements in youth-oriented magazines: Persuasive themes and responsibility messages. Journal of Health Education, 36(5), 258-265.

11. Beese, J. “Please Link Responsibly: Social Media Guidelines for Alcohol Marketing.” March 30, 2015. Sprout Social. Available at: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-alcohol-marketing/. Accessed August 11, 2023.

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The Corporate Cynicism Behind "Responsibility Month"

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You might not have noticed there's a quiet a battle for April. Not a battle fought on that day, nor for a person named April. The month of April. On one side are advocates for public health and lives that do not end in preventable deaths. On the other are the Big Alcohol corporations that benefit from the status quo. The battleground is something as simple, as stupid, and yet as powerful as a word.

"Responsibility."

This year, the organization Responsibility.org introduced a social media campaign titled "April is Responsibility Month". The campaign was specifically hinged on taking April's established Alcohol Awareness Month and replacing it with the concept of responsibility (with a hashtag). Their explanation relies on very assertive and utterly misleading language.

Awareness is important – how is one to eliminate an issue like drunk driving or underage drinking if one isn’t aware of the facts surrounding that issue or the effective strategies to implement in order to create change?

Yes, “awareness” is a crucial step in the fight against drunk driving and underage drinking. But, it is only the first step.

Equally critical -- if not more so -- is “responsibility.” If each organization and person – parent, teacher, college student, law enforcement official, judge, prosecutor, industry employee, and so on – were to take ownership and responsibility for eliminating these issues, drunk driving and underage drinking would decline at an even more rapid rate than they have over the last two decades (which is a lot, btw).

As it is currently carried out, April's Alcohol Awareness Month serves as a platform for organizations all over the government, health, and advocacy sectors to launch their own campaigns. These disparate campaigns each highlight the various needs to cut down on the ever-rising tide of alcohol mortality. This mortality derives from all sorts of proximal causes: violence, motor vehicle crashes, alcohol poisonings, overdoses primed by combining drugs and alcohol, agonizing deaths from liver failure and cancer, heart disease and neurodegeneration, and many more. The distal cause, though, remains the same: alcohol overconsumption.

By narrowing the spotlight to only shine on dangerous driving and underage use, Responsibility.org hides many, many deaths and injuries associated with alcohol. By claiming the central concern is "responsibility," the organization makes it seem like the problem is individuals. According to this framing, structural reforms do not exist and that producers could not possibly be expected to operate differently. The particular framing for "Responsibility Month" is even more cruelly misleading, as while underage drinking has been declining, the "rapid" rate was a product of the pandemic-related lockdowns. (In fact, last year, most measures of youth drinking went up compared to 2021.) The irony of including industry employees as a group that should be more "responsible" while not taking the responsibility for their own sloppy and misleading language is likely not lost on the authors of this campaign.

Because, it turns out, the authors of this campaign are for all intents and purposes industry employees.

Responsibility.org is underwritten by a true rogue's gallery of Big Alcohol.  Multinational megadistiller (and tireless opponent to any governmental health-related campaigns) Diageo heads up the list, with Bacardi and the binge-centered Jagermeister behind them. Most notable to Alcohol Justice supporters would be Constellation Brands, whose Mexico-based breweries have helped bleed the ground dry and who joined Responsbility.org only in 2022, after the Mexicali Resiste movement exposed their devastation and ground their construction efforts to a halt. But even smaller producers understand the value of preventing any serious action. Over 120 craft producers support the effort, including the Bay Area's 21st Amendment, and Buzz Ballz, whose high-alcohol content, heavily flavored, quirkily packaged, and sophomorically named offerings are probably the epitome of a youth-focused product.  

The reach does not even end there, however. Aside from the Big- and Would-Be-Big Alcohol sponsors, Responsbility.org receives funding from all sorts of organizations interested in alcohol deregulation.  Prominent among these is Amazon, whose bottomless appetite for monopoly has already lead to them planning a wide-set effort to destroy public health-oriented alcohol restrictions. Joining them are delivery companies Grubhub, Uber, and notorious tip-stealers Doordash--all groups that would like to make anytime, anywhere alcohol the law of the land, leaving "responsibility" the only remaining brake against harm. Lastly, as legalization continues, the cannabis companies GoPuff and Canopy have declared a vested interest in a world where the harm from substance use can only ever be the fault of the person experiencing it. (And Constellation also owns a major stake in Canopy, making it even clearer how corporate interests are aligning.)

Despite these many moneyed groups' claims to be reconceiving alcohol harm prevention, their favored tactic--to blame individuals--will likely struggle in growing.  Not because we are too savvy, but because in the U.S., the public response has always been to reflexively blame people experiencing substance use issues. But true change, moving closer to an environment that is truly protective against alcohol-related death, harm, and misery, requires a big lift. The United States needs bold ideas like effective health labelling, alcohol ad-free public spaces, ABV-pegged excise taxes, and charge-for-harm tax and fee strategies have to be backed up by time-tested approaches such as retail availability limits, lower BAC thresholds for ticketing, and increased availability of alcohol-free youth activities. Those cannot be put forward through individual responsibility, only through collective pressure and care. And Big Alcohol should be held responsible for its cruel and deep-pocketed efforts to deny that.

Sign image by Nosha via Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

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