Effectiveness of Policies Maintaining or Restricting Days of Alcohol Sales on Excessive Alcohol Consumption and Related Harms

Abstract

Local, state, and national laws and policies that limit the days of the week on which alcoholic beverages may be sold may be a means of reducing excessive alcohol consumption and related harms. The methods of the Guide to Community Preventive Services were used to synthesize scientific evidence on the effectiveness for preventing excessive alcohol consumption and related harms of laws and policies maintaining or reducing the days when alcoholic beverages may be sold. Outcomes assessed in 14 studies that met qualifying criteria were excessive alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harms, including motor vehicle injuries and deaths, violence-related and other injuries, and health conditions. Qualifying studies assessed the effects of changes in days of sale in both on-premises settings (at which alcoholic beverages are consumed where purchased) and off-premises settings (at which alcoholic beverages may not be consumed where purchased). Eleven studies assessed the effects of adding days of sale, and three studies assessed the effects of imposing a ban on sales on a given weekend day. The evidence from these studies indicated that increasing days of sale leads to increases in excessive alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harms and that reducing the number of days that alcoholic beverages are sold generally decreases alcohol-related harms. Based on these findings, when the expansion of days of sale is being considered, laws and policies maintaining the number of days of the week that alcoholic beverages are sold at on- and off-premises outlets in local, state, and national jurisdictions are effective public health strategies for preventing excessive alcohol consumption and related harms.

Reducing Binge Drinking? The Effect of a Ban on Late-Night Off-Premise Alcohol Sales on Alcohol-Related Hospital Stays in Germany

“…These studies analyze how changes in the hours and days of alcohol sales affect consumption, hospitalizations, traffic fatalities, and crime (Norström and Skog 2005;Vingilis et al 2005;Chikritzhs and Stockwell 2006;McMillan and Lapham 2006;Vingilis 2007;Middleton et al 2010). Vingilis (2007), Popova et al (2009) and Middleton et al 3 Overall, the literature on regulating economic access to alcohol finds that alcohol consumption decreases with rising prices and that raising alcohol taxes is effective in preventing alcohol-related problems (Grossman et al 1993;Manning et al 1995;Ruhm 1996;Dee 1999;Moore 2000, 2002;Young and Bielinska-Kwapisz 2006;Carpenter et al 2007;Wagenaar et al 2009Wagenaar et al , 2010Chaloupka and Xu 2011).…”

Revisão sistemática sobre tratamentos psicológicos para problemas relacionados ao crack

“…Não foram identificados estudos que dimensionassem a efetividade de quaisquer abordagens em termos de mudanças de padrões de consumo do crack entre indivíduos que não se abstenham. Para outras drogas, em especial para o álcool, a literatura oferece estudos que lidam com essa possibilidade [43][44][45][46][47] . Isso é possivelmente atribuível à ilicitude do consumo de crack, associada a alguma estigmatização do hábito de consumo e, principalmente, à gravidade de muitos quadros clínicos decorrentes do uso do crack que chegam aos serviços de saúde.…”

Commentary on Hobday et al. (2015): Inconsistent results beneath consistent conclusions—the need for a new approach to analysing alcohol availability

“…This has strengthened the conclusions of previous systematic reviews that reducing alcohol availability is an effective approach to reducing alcohol-related harm [3][4][5]. However, while not strongly disputing this general conclusion, commentators have highlighted problems: Livingston et al [6] noted that similar studies often yield contradictory findings, such as bar density but not liquor store density being predictive of violence in one study (e.g.…”