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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Data project could help limit excessive alcohol use across the state

The stern underage drinking posters that adorn residence halls and classrooms bear a familiar message for students: Underage drinking is bad for your health, it’s bad for your grades and it’s illegal. While these platitudes may be true, experts at the UW-Madison Law School say such campaigns don’t really work.

“Informational learning doesn’t change behavior. We all know what happens when you don’t study or do your assignments,” Julia Sherman, lead coordinator of the law school’s Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project, said. “A lot of campaigns early on kind of worked off the idea that if people know better, that will change their behavior. We know that’s not true now. We need to give a little nudge of help.”

That nudge is the goal of the project, which Sherman has helmed since its inception in 2010. Instead of using information campaigns deemed fruitless, the project uses quantitative data to implement evidence-based policies aimed at curbing excessive alcohol use. The program coordinates with municipalities, law enforcement, public health agencies and community leaders across Wisconsin.

“Having lived in Wisconsin, I recognize that we have a lot of authority on the local level,” Sherman said. “We have the ability to improve our own alcohol environment, we just weren’t doing it.”

The project, though, has started to catalyze some of those improvements. In the Village of Oregon, the project found success by working with the community to rewrite the criteria for issuing alcohol licenses and to adopt ordinances to limit underage drinking. Oregon also became the only place in Dane County to prohibit single servings of alcohol from being sold at gas stations.

“Nobody is really buying one beer to take home and put in the refrigerator,” Sherman explained.

The program is also analyzing which bars are over-serving customers through its “Place of Last Drink” study. The research is based on forms individuals fill out after Operating While Intoxicated arrests. The forms ask where the individual last had alcohol, allowing the researchers to discover over-serving patterns.

“The overall goal is just to make Wisconsin a safer place,” said Phil Glapa, a UW-Madison senior who conducts research for the project. “So, if there are alcohol vendors that are over-serving, ideally we can present this data and help them by providing training. It’s an easy fix … it doesn’t cost any money to just say, ‘Hey, we see that people are being overserved, you need to work on that.’”

The project focuses much of its energy on examining the costs of excessive alcohol use, which is part of what Sherman says makes this research significant for all Wisconsinites. According to a 2013 report, excessive alcohol use costs Wisconsin more than $6.8 billion each year, largely via hospital and law enforcement expenses.

“If we cut that cost, we cut hospital costs. We cut police costs,” Sherman said. “We cut all kinds of costs. And that makes life easier for all of us.”

This data collected by the project has not only guided decision-making, but also illuminated what some of the problems in Wisconsin truly are. Often, these results are contrary to common narratives. Research has exposed, for example, that alcohol-related falls kill far more people than alcohol-related car accidents. Data has also shown that in the past decade Wisconsin’s underage drinking rate has gone from the nation’s highest to the national average.

“Senior citizens’ excessive alcohol use [is] increasing dramatically,” Sherman said. “It’s more worrisome in many cases than underage drinking … People assume that college kids are the problem, right? In this case, it’s simply not true.”

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Despite the abundance of new information such data has provided, Wisconsin’s image is still deeply tied to a culture of drinking. With more evidence-based policies, though, Sherman says Wisconsin can continue to improve.

“We’re making enormous strides,” Sherman said. “And the statistics back me up.”

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