Crusader Urges Communities: Say No to Alcohol : Drinking: Ray Chavira hopes his return to a county commission will further his fight to make liquor less popular and harder to get.

This has been a season of triumph for Ray Chavira, an ex-teacher and recovering alcoholic who has spent the past 17 years urging communities to say no to booze.

Although he is an inveterate pessimist who uses apocalyptic terms to warn that alcohol is killing off the nation’s youth, even Chavira has found reason to smile in recent months.

He was reappointed in March to the Los Angeles County Commission on Alcoholism, returning after a six-year absence to a post he says gives him a platform for his view that communities, as well as individuals, must bear some responsibility for such problems as drunk driving and alcohol-related murder, suicide and child abuse.

Earlier this month, the county took a key step toward approving a measure, pushed by Chavira for a decade, that would require bars, restaurants and stores in unincorporated areas to win local approval before receiving alcoholic-beverage sales licenses now granted by the state. Lancaster, where Chavira moved in 1990, and Palmdale also are heading in that direction with the prompting of a group he co-founded.

Such a measure is a prime weapon in the arsenal of those who, like Chavira, want to create an environment in which drinking is less popular, less convenient and more expensive--through higher taxes, shorter sales hours, better enforcement of restrictions on sales to minors and other means. Significantly, Chavira’s license plate reads SIN TAXS.

That so-called environmental perspective has gained momentum in recent years after being dismissed earlier as a cover for those who want to return to Prohibition. In February, for example, the Los Angeles County Office of Alcohol Programs for the first time awarded $500,000 to 11 programs that come under the environmental umbrella and recent research has found that more-traditional prevention projects, such as educational programs, are unreliable.

“No one calls me a radical anymore,” said Chavira, a stocky, blunt-spoken deputy probation officer who says his alcohol policy work is a hobby. “I’m gray-haired and 60 and they know I’m a doer and I’ve been there. . . . I’m showing them a way.”

He said that what he is engaging in at countless public hearings, legislative sessions, city council meetings and conferences is “propaganda warfare of the highest sort,” aimed at countering “the real devils” in the alcoholic beverage industry whose job it is to increase sales.

“We’re talking about the truth as we see it . . . and if the community doesn’t buy it, then so be it,” said Chavira, whose didactic manner is a reminder of the high school history teacher that he once was.

Now that he is returning to the commission, Chavira said he will use it as an opportunity to urge the County Board of Supervisors to lobby for statewide controls. Also on his agenda will be efforts to reach out to other groups, such as homeowners, who have an interest in quality-of-life issues such as the proliferation of liquor outlets. In addition, he said, he will seek a ban on the sales of so-called nonalcoholic beers and wines to minors.

His confident lecturing inspires some people but turns off others. And though part of Chavira’s message is gaining acceptance, his style sometimes grates, even his backers agree.

“I think he’s terrific . . . and will bring some energy that will be very important on that commission,” said Barbara Bloomberg, a former alcoholism commission member who now works for a teen-age substance abuse prevention program.

She acknowledges, however, that “he’s been controversial and a lot of people are really alienated” by what she says is his unwillingness to compromise. “They don’t want to get behind him . . . because he comes off as so hard-nosed about it, almost like Carrie Nation with a hatchet.”

In addition, many of the causes he has promoted--the elimination or tight restriction of alcoholic-beverage advertising, dramatically higher taxes on booze to raise money for treatment programs, a ban on happy hours and an end to the sale of beer and wine at gas stations--have stalled.

Still, Chavira wins warm praise for his constancy and passion.

“There are very few people in the country that make that effort and much of that is on his own time,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest, a health-oriented public policy research group. In 1989, partly with Chavira’s help and urging, the center published a groundbreaking study of how alcohol is marketed to Latinos, a group that has experienced disproportionate problems related to drinking.

“He is a classic volunteer, a point of light and an inspiration to people in other parts of the country to see what an individual can do in getting laws passed, in educating the public,” Jacobson said. “The mainstream has caught up with Ray.”

Chavira last took a drink in 1974, after a quarter century of boozing. During that time, alcohol cost him two marriages, a career as a teachers union official and his relationship with his children, he says.

Almost from the time he achieved sobriety he’s been stumping to find ways to make it easier for people, especially the young, to resist the temptation--by making it harder for them to get a drink.

His first project was organizing support for a doctor whose position at a neighborhood alcoholism clinic in East Los Angeles was about to be eliminated. A teachers union activist during his 16 years in the classroom, he knew what levers to pull and was able to get the position restored.

He became a counselor at the county Juvenile Hall in 1975 and later functioned as a liaison between Probation Department managers and the county’s Employee Assistance Program for workers plagued by drug or alcohol problems.

In 1981, he was appointed by conservative Republican Supervisor Mike Antonovich to the 15-member alcoholism commission, which was then concerned almost exclusively with recommending funding for treatment programs. In 1982, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown ( D-San Francisco) appointed him to the state Advisory Board on Alcohol Problems, demonstrating that the evils of alcohol are bipartisan, Chavira said.

Chavira served as chairman of the prevention committees of both panels and set about organizing conferences and presentations by experts who shared his views. He also put together public demonstrations aimed at blocking the sale of beer and wine at gas stations and at removing alcoholic-beverage billboards from minority neighborhoods. He wasn’t reappointed to the state board in 1985 or to the county commission in 1986, and Chavira says he wasn’t told why.

Several observers said his views were at odds with many of his fellow county commissioners, who objected when he began publicly allying himself with the then-emerging “new temperance” movement that was termed by some as a “smoke screen for a return to Prohibition.”

“The commissioners said . . . we don’t want to be identified in any way with Prohibition, because it does not work,” said a commissioner who served with Chavira and who asked not to be named. “So we asked him not to use that term when he was speaking on behalf of the commission.”

Chavira says he is not a Prohibitionist but that his enemies know labeling him as such reduces his effectiveness. “It’s almost like calling us Commies. It’s supposed to be the kiss of death and end it all, but it doesn’t end it all,” he said.

He does, however, argue that Prohibition was not a complete failure. People drank less, they were healthier and there were fewer divorces and other family problems, he said. Prohibition ended in 1933, he said, because politicians argued that it would create jobs and that the sale of alcoholic beverages would be regulated.

The promised regulation has, however, been “successfully watered down . . . with the help of the industry’s lackeys in legislatures and governors’ offices,” he said.

So Chavira has focused his efforts on beefing up that regulation. In 1990, he moved to Lancaster from Lynwood with his third wife, Mildred, because he wanted to buy a house. He expected that his local work would come to an end, but instead he helped found the High Desert Alcohol Policy Coalition and tried to block a liquor license for a new Black Angus restaurant. The license went through, but with restrictions on sales practices and hours advocated by Chavira.

Since then, the group, which has spawned spinoffs in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys and on the Westside, has argued against other licenses and has pressed for new ordinances to require alcohol merchants in Palmdale and Lancaster to win local approval, through conditional use permits, for their plans. Those ordinances are now being developed.

The group has also raised local consciousness about alcohol availability, and nearly every City Council candidate appeared at a forum sponsored by the coalition to state their views on the issue.

Chavira’s single-mindedness regarding alcohol problems is criticized by those who say he does not make adequate funding for treatment programs, especially in hard-hit minority communities, a high enough priority.

Jim Hernandez, the head of several treatment facilities and director of the California Hispanic Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, said problem drinkers need help on a personal level regardless of the stance that communities take.

“Simply because availability is limited or advertising is curtailed, it doesn’t mean that the individual is not going to have a drinking problem,” he said. Although it is one of several key approaches to alcohol problems, limiting availability “is not enough . . . and people tend to discount you because that’s all you’re promoting,” he said.

Ironically, Chavira himself said he recently realized that he probably had overemphasized the importance of policies limiting alcohol availability. And that insight, he said, came in connection with a private event that he said resulted in him having one of the best days he has had since he stopped drinking.

Three of his children, with whom he had been cordial during infrequent visits since drinking ended his second marriage, organized a warm and emotional surprise reunion earlier this month. Hurt feelings and a sense of abandonment were brought into the open. Tears and hugs washed away blame and guilt. “It was terrific,” Chavira said several days later. “We had a great session.”

The family meeting taught him that “I was getting too theoretical,” Chavira said. “I had begun thinking that public policy work was everything, and I’d gotten away from the gut-feeling level.”

Still, he said, he would not be deterred from what he sees as his mission.

“The country is a modern Rome and it’s burning, because it’s been overrun by the barbarians, who are us,” he said. “I think things will get worse . . . in our lifetimes, but I still have the responsibility to alert politicians and the public to the nature of the burning, as I see it.”