By Rick Berman
ABL Washington Counsel The swings of politics generally operate on a pendulum.
Republicans beat Democrats and then Democrats beat Republicans. People become panicked about kidnappings or SARS or competition from the Japanese, and then the panic fades away.
The pendulum swings back and forth.
This is certainly the case when it comes to the political issues that affect taverns and liquor stores.
Although we still have to fight proposed smoking bans, we're starting to see a cooling of the anti-tobacco attack. That' largely because of the growing issue of obesity.
First, in 2001 the Surgeon General issued a warning about obesity similar to the famous 1964 warning about tobacco. Last year the Feds said obesity would soon overtake smoking as the nation' leading cause of preventable death (they were wrong, but that' another matter entirely.) Surveys of public health officials show they are far more concerned about obesity than smoking.
But here' the kicker. It turns out that a big reason for America' growing waistline is that people are smoking less. Experts attribute about 20 percent of our weight increase to the fact that we aren't smoking as much anymore. While we can't get complacent about smoking bans, it is amusing to see the pendulum swing back.
Hopefully we are now seeing the pendulum swing back on drinking and driving. This spring a woman named Debra Bolton was handcuffed and hauled off to a Washington, D.C., jail because she had a glass of wine with dinner. Her blood-alcohol concentration was 0.03 percent, less than half the legal limit.
Bolton was released at 4:30 in the morning, but her story hardly ended there. She was charged as a DUI offender.
Rather than pay a fine and submit to 24 hours of classes, Bolton fought back. Two thousand dollars and four court appearances later, the charges were finally dropped (although she still had the unenviable task of confronting a DMV that wanted to suspend her license).
In the nation' capitol Bolton' story caused a media fire storm, which then spread throughout the country. People were outraged at the way this mother of two had been treated.
Residents of Washington, D.C., were also outraged to learn that there was an official zero tolerance policy on the books. Forget the 0.08 BAC limit. Washington, D.C., law explicitly gave cops the right to arrest someone who had anything at all to drink before driving. Thanks to the outrage over Bolton' story, that law was quickly repealed.
That' where ABL stepped in.
We launched an advertising campaign on the back of buses within the Washington metro transit system. It' message? "Drink and Drive Responsibly." The advertisement ran for one month. In that time, almost 90 percent of the D.C. area population viewed the ads, and it' estimated the typical person saw them 14 times.
We expected complaints. Lots of them. We figured MADD and its allies would whine over our point about moderate drinking and driving. We thought neo-prohibitionists in government would attack. And we assumed at least some people in the general population wouldn't approve of the message.
Instead, we received no complaints. Not a single one.
Could this mean the tide is turning? Is the pendulum swinging back, after years of neo-prohibitionist onslaught?
Perhaps people really do have an unarticulated belief that we're right--that there is such a thing as responsible drinking and driving. Perhaps they intuitively understand that the vast majority of today' drunk driving problem comes from hard core alcoholics who get behind the wheel after eight, 10 or 12 drinks.
ABL should be congratulated for running the ad, "Drink and Drive Responsibly." It was aggressive even for an aggressive association like ABL.
And it was a total success.
Source: ABL Leader, January, 2006, published monthly by Continental Communications, 125 W. Granite St., Suite 102, Butte, MT 59701.