City Panel Asks to Ban Alcohol on Beaches

In a wide-ranging series of proposals aimed at curbing drug and alcohol abuse, a San Diego task force Monday proposed a total ban on drinking at all city beaches and suggested that the City Council encourage all candidates for public office to take a random drug test.

The Mayor’s Committee Against Drug Abuse also called for a ban on advertising alcoholic beverages at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium and other city facilities, smaller beer cups at the stadium, and a total ban on the sale of drug paraphernalia within city limits.

The recommendations were among 33 offered by the task force after 15 months of studying city drug problems, including addicted newborns, gang members’ involvement in drug dealing and substance abuse in the workplace.

‘Commitment Essential’

“Your sustained commitment is essential to our city’s recovery,” Bishop George McKinney, chairman of the 43-member task force, told the council Monday. “Take what your committee has delivered to you and look to how we all can accomplish eradication of this ubiquitous malady.”

The council, promising in the words of Mayor Maureen O’Connor that “we’re not going to just leave it on the shelf,” sent the report to its Rules Committee, which will parcel out various recommendations to other council committees for action.

Despite more than a year of examining the city’s drug problem, the task force purposely refrained from offering an estimate of the cost of its proposals in order not to distract attention from their content, said Dr. Marianne Felice, the panel’s vice chairwoman.

The panel’s other major recommendations include:

- That the city establish a standing committee called the San Diego Substance Abuse Commitment to implement the recommendations.

- That the city open a teen hot line on which campus drug dealers could be reported anonymously.

- That a center for perinatal addiction be created to help pregnant women and new mothers who abuse drugs, and their children.

- That the council support and work to create programs that provide jobs for gang members, some of whom told the task force that “dealing and abusing drugs was regarded as desirable masculine behavior and was considered a viable way to make money by the fifth or sixth grades.”

A number of recommendations called on the city to aid law enforcement agencies and support measures aimed at reducing jail crowding.

Although many of the proposals call for bureaucratic responses to the drug problem, such as the creation of committees or working for added funds, a few are singular for their unorthodoxy.

Debate Expected

The group is almost certain to spark widespread debate with its call for a total ban on alcohol consumption on city beaches. The city has a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. ban on drinking on Mission Beach and La Jolla beaches, but it exempted Ocean Beach from that moratorium when the neighborhood petitioned for exclusion.

Felice said the current situation provides “conflicting information” to beachgoers. “There’s some beaches where you can drink, and some where you cannot. Why don’t we just take a stand?”

Jack Pearson, a former San Diego police officer who is the task force’s consultant, said the proposed drinking ban is an effort by the panel to call attention to the pervasiveness of alcohol use.

“It’s not going to ruin people’s lives not to be able to go and have a glass of wine,” Pearson said. “It’s going to alter” their lives.

The city itself would not lose revenue if Budweiser and Bud Lite advertisements were taken off the stadium scoreboard, but such a move might affect the San Diego Padres baseball club, which controls scoreboard advertising, said Steve Shushan, stadium business manager. The city is guaranteed $150,000, or 10% of advertising revenue, whichever is greater, he said.

A spokesman for the Padres said the team could not respond to the recommendation until officials see the task force report.

Similarly, it is difficult to gauge the effect of decreasing the size of beer cups at the stadium, Shushan said. The city receives varying amounts of revenue from food and beverage sales depending on whether the Padres, the San Diego Chargers or the San Diego State Aztecs are playing, Shushan said.

“Maybe people would be making more trips (to concession stands),” Shushan said. “You don’t know if their consumption will be changed.”

Service America Corp., the stadium’s concessionaire, last year eliminated a 30-ounce beer cup at the request of the Padres, he said. In 1985, the Padres banned beer sales after the 7th inning to curb rowdyism. In 1986, the Stadium Authority ended beer sales after the 3rd quarter of San Diego State football games after brawling erupted among fans during the Aztecs’ game with UCLA.

Pearson said candidates for local elected office should take drug tests to demonstrate their leadership on the issue.