Street Drunks Offered an Assist : Wine Sale Bans, Counseling Attack Alcoholism Problem

As downtown Portland grew up and out during the last decade, it squeezed its population of homeless alcoholics into a smaller and smaller part of the Old Town section north of Burnside Avenue.

Merchants in the area swiftly grew exasperated with the crime, litter and other problems that resulted, and they eventually persuaded the state to ban the sale of fortified wine and beer in the heart of the local Skid Row.

Cities from Sacramento to Seattle recently have tried similar bans to address the problem of homeless street drunks. The latest is San Francisco, where a citizens group persuaded two wine makers to suspend fortified-wine sales in one seedy neighborhood to see if it reduces public drunkenness and alcohol-related violence and illness.

Despite the appeal of dealing with the problem simply by declaring a ban, cities that have tried them report limited success--unless, as in the Portland program, such wine bans are accompanied by intensive counseling, detoxification and housing programs.

Wine bans alone are “not the solution,” said J. Daniel Steffey, director of the Portland Bureau of Community Development and architect of Portland’s anti-alcoholism and homelessness program. “The solution is greater counseling and health care; not trying to dry up the source but trying to reduce the demand.”

It is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, he acknowledged, but need not be expensive. One program here treats drug and alcohol abusers for about $160 a month for each client, with more than half the participants sober and employed at the end of six months.

In San Francisco, the people behind the latest wine ban said they were limited in what they could do because the city has too many street drunks to provide the same kind of care that is available in Portland. The nature and number of drunks, they added, had made them an immediate threat to a neighborhood populated by thousands of vulnerable pensioners and children of recent immigrants.

“This wine changes people,” said Betty Mangual, president of a tenant association at one of the low-income hotels in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. “It changes their perceptions. When they’re sober, they’re sorry for their actions, but when they drink they’re dangerous. Even the junkies aren’t as dangerous.

“If they have a few beers, they might be obnoxious. But if they’re drinking this wine, they’ll knock down old people, chase kids. They will hurt you, hurt themselves, lay down in the street and urinate on themselves.”

Phil Faight, a tavern owner and president of the Safe and Sober Streets Committee, said he hopes the Tenderloin wine ban will be at least as successful as a year-old voluntary ban arranged by liquor merchants in the Haight-Ashbury district. There, San Francisco police have noticed a decline in the number of drunks detained, although hard figures are unavailable because inebriates are only held until sober and are rarely booked for a crime.

‘One Little Battle’

“We realize this (trial ban) is not THE answer, it’s just one little battle,” Faight said. “But if we win this battle, it will be an important step in the right direction.”

Similar sentiments are behind wine bans in other cities. Seattle had the state liquor control board ban the sale of fortified wines in selected urban districts, while Sacramento prohibits downtown stores from selling small bottles of fortified wine.

Faight added that he hopes that once current stocks of fortified wine in San Francisco’s Tenderloin are exhausted and their shelf space given to some other products, it will be difficult for wine makers to reestablish themselves.

Fortified wines have become the focus of Skid Row wine bans because they are the preferred alcoholic beverage of the majority of those late-stage alcoholics most often associated with urban street inebriation.

Such wines have brandy or other distilled spirits added to raise their alcohol content to anywhere from 14% to 20% or more. By contrast, table wines, such as those consumed with meals, contain from 10% to 13% alcohol.

Cheaper Ingredients

Fine sherry, port and Madeira also are fortified wines, but the products preferred by street drunks are produced with cheaper ingredients and often are mixed with fruit juices to make them more palatable.

The high alcohol level of the cheap fortified street wines and their modest prices--as low as 89 cents a bottle--make them the cheapest easily available source of alcohol on a cents-per-ounce basis, researchers have found. Alcohol in even inexpensive generic-brand vodka or other distilled spirits can be as much as 50% costlier, according to data from the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto.

The market for cheap fortified wines is dominated by two large companies, Canandaigua Wine Co. of New York state and E & J Gallo of Modesto. They often sell these products under the names of subsidiaries, allowing them to distance their pricier up-market wine brands from these products. Canandaigua makes or markets Richards’ Wild Irish Rose and Cisco. Gallo sells Night Train Express and Thunderbird.

“These are high-octane wines, and the only people who drink them are alcoholics,” said Susan Galbraith of the National Council on Alcoholism in Washington. “The fact is that someone who makes this product is obviously targeting it at late-stage alcoholics. It’s tragic.”

Galbraith said such wines contribute substantially to the country’s annual toll of 100,000 alcohol-related deaths.

Discounts Charge

Elisabeth M. Holmgren, a research analyst on health and social issues at The Wine Institute in San Francisco, discounted that charge.

“The product itself cannot be blamed for problems associated with it,” she said.

Gallo, when it agreed to a test ban in San Francisco, said it doubted that the experiment would prove much.

“We believe, and the evidence tends to support, that if alcoholics are deprived of one source (of alcohol), be it beer, wine or cheap distilled spirits, they will find another, regardless of difficulty or cost,” the company said in a written statement.

At best, cities that do nothing more than ban such beverages can only point to anecdotal evidence that limiting the availability of the high-alcohol drink of choice for late-stage alcoholics has slightly decreased the number of public inebriates.

The most extensive test done in this area, conducted among several small towns in northwestern Ontario, Canada, in the late 1970s, found that drinkers deprived of their preferred fortified wines simply switched to regular table wines or other alcoholic beverages. The total volume of alcohol consumed during the test was the same as that drunk in similar towns nearby.

Wine Bans Analyzed

The Addiction Research Foundation, which studied that government-sponsored experiment, also analyzed the effect of inadvertent “wine bans” caused by strikes in Canada and Finland. In those cases, researchers found that a change in the type but not necessarily the volume of alcohol consumed did trim the incidence of drunkenness, arrests and alcohol-related assaults and hospital admissions.

Portland had a much simpler result: When it banned fortified wine and beer in one neighborhood in 1985, drinkers simply moved into another--from seedy Old Town to vibrant, newly redeveloped downtown.

Rather than accept what at first seemed to be a defeat, Portland Mayor J. E. (Bud) Clark, a tavern owner, used that apparent setback to muster support for a serious, comprehensive program to rehabilitate the 3,000 homeless people estimated in the metropolitan area.

People who had been ambivalent about the suffering of the homeless grew much more interested when the most visible segment of that population--late-stage alcoholics, 35% of Portland’s homeless--wound up on their doorsteps.

Many of the elements of the program Portland pioneered had to be developed as events unfolded, Steffey said.

No Single Answer

Perhaps the most fundamental truth Portland discovered over the last four years--and what officials from other cities are coming here to learn for themselves--is that a wine ban alone is not the answer to chronic street inebriation.

Portland followed up its wine ban, which still is in effect in a 60-block area just north of downtown, with a 12-point plan to assist all of the city’s homeless citizens--families as well as singles, drug abusers and victims of spousal abuse, the illiterate and the unlucky.

Administered by two private social service agencies on a modest $220,000 annual budget pieced together from local, state and federal sources, the program focuses on rehabilitating the homeless to become independent again, not maintaining them temporarily in shelters.

To a surprising degree, the program seems to work.

Steffey said 70% of the participants who enter the system without alcohol or drug problems find a job and housing in six months with the program’s help.

The success rate for those who are chemically dependent is about 55%, said Jean DeMaster, executive director of the Burnside Projects, one of the private agencies that runs the program.

‘Fewer Alcoholics’

“We have far less alcoholism now, and far fewer alcoholics on the street,” she said, an assertion supported by a tour through Old Town.

However, DeMaster said that a recent explosion of drug use, fed by the easy availability of cheap “crack” and “crank”--cocaine and amphetamines--will keep the program busy even as it begins to come to grips with the city’s alcoholism problem.

Inebriates, whether they are drugged or drunk, enter the Portland program in a number of ways. Some are referred by other agencies and others volunteer. Many are introduced after being scooped up and detained by deputized health-service workers under a service called “Person Down” that responds to reports of unconscious or intoxicated street people. They are held in custody until sober, then counseled to enter a rehabilitation program.

The most successful of the services is the drug- and alcohol-free housing, where alcoholics and addicts recover and look for permanent housing and jobs while living in rehabilitated hotels for up to six months--providing that they remain clean and sober. Compliance is monitored by other residents of the hotel and confirmed by spot urinalysis by social workers.

San Francisco Program

San Francisco, like several other cities, has studied Portland’s program and is adopting parts of it.

DeMaster said that is more important than simply banning fortified wines.

“If you took the ban alone, would that make a difference? Probably not,” she said last week between tasks in the aging brick building that houses the Burnside Projects’ homeless shelter and its offices. “It certainly would not make a difference to the alcoholics. What has worked here in Portland is a combination of all these things.”