Drink specials quadruple likelihood of exiting a bar over legal limit to drive

May 13, 2008

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A last call should be issued for drink specials because they dramatically increase the risk of college students walking out of a bar intoxicated, especially if they are underage, a new University of Florida study finds.

The study is unusual in that it obtained breath samples from college students to measure intoxication levels after they exited bars, rather than relying on self-reports, said Virginia Dodd, a professor in UF’s department of health education and behavior.

“These drink specials foster the same mentality as an all-you-can eat buffet,” said Dodd, one of the study’s researchers. “When you pay a certain amount of money, you’re going to want to drink to get your money’s worth.”

Customers who take advantage of drink specials offered as part of such promotions as “happy hour,” “ladies night” and especially “all you can drink” were more than four times as likely to leave liquor-serving establishments with a blood-alcohol level exceeding the legal limit for driving than patrons who did not participate in a drink promotion, Dodd said.

These discounts were more important than the total number of drinks people consumed that day, the hours they spent drinking, the amount of money they spent on alcohol or whether they were of legal drinking age, said Dennis Thombs, a UF health education and behavior professor who led the research. The study is scheduled to appear in the American Journal of Health Behavior this summer.

“Contrary to what the bar management may contend, there is no doubt that drink specials influence the extent to which young people become intoxicated, and the problem is especially worrisome in those under age,” Thombs said.

Sixty-eight percent of the study’s participants under the age of 21 who took advantage of a drink special had a blood-alcohol level above the legal limit of .08 compared with only 32 percent of those aged 21 and older, the study found.

“I think what’s happening is that if younger people have gone to the trouble to get into a bar and they’re underage, they’re really going to whoop it up,” Thombs said.

Although other studies have found a direct relationship between alcohol promotions and the amount that college students drink, they have relied on students’ self-reports, Thombs said. Students may not accurately remember how many drinks they had, and self-reports don’t take into account individual differences in body weight and alcohol metabolism, which can affect intoxication levels, he said.

The researchers collected information on 177 men and 114 women — 86 percent of whom were college students — at 15 bars in Gainesville during three nights in December 2006 and three nights in May 2007. They interviewed the students as they left the bars and walked out onto the sidewalks and had them blow into a hand-held breath-testing device to determine their blood-alcohol levels. More than half of the patrons were intoxicated upon leaving the establishment, with 59 percent of the men and 57 percent of the women having blood-alcohol levels of .08 or higher, Thombs said.

There is an association between consuming four or five alcoholic beverages at least once in a two-week period with high-risk sexual behavior, poor academic performance and other problems in the college student population, Dodd said. To combat underage drinking in bars, some cities have passed laws prohibiting anyone under a certain age from entering the premises, but unless administered on a statewide basis young people often drive to other cities to avoid them, she said.

The researchers found the biggest problem was not drink markdowns so much as being able to drink an unlimited amount for a set fee, Dodd said. “We’ve seen students who have blown a really high reading into the breath tester and said, ‘Wow! I got all that for $4,’” she said.

The type of drink special that seems to cause the most all-around harm is Ladies Drink Free Night, Dodd said. “Women who become intoxicated this way are exposed to all sorts of risks, including leaving a bar with someone they don’t know and having unprotected sex,” she said. “We know it is not just college males who hang out at these bars on Ladies Night, but older men from the community as well.”